Teachers Celebrate Weirdness

I just returned from the Gertrude B. Nielsen Child Care and Learning Center
where I facilitated a What Color Is Your “Leadership” Brain Color? for 18 teachers who have supervisory responsibilities. I met  Lana Weiner, the Executive Director when I facilitated a 3 hour leadership workshop for the National Lewis University McCormick Center for Early Childhood Leadership Conference, last May. I was delighted when Lana called and asked me to work with her staff.

The teachers determined their “Leadership Brain Color” and then divided into their Yellow, Blue, Green and Orange Brain Color Groups to answer the following questions that offered helpful insight about one another.
According to your Brain Color:
1. How do you communicate with parents?
2. How do you encourage/motivate the staff you supervise to stay excited about their jobs?
3. What makes you smile?

Of course, their answers varied because of their Brain Color personalities.
However, each group agreed that the children make them smile!

I smiled because the teachers enjoyed discovering their Brain Colors.
I also smiled because I love facilitating my program in such a welcoming, joyful and engaging learning environment that had an amazing aviary with brightly colored finches in the lobby!

I concluded my program with one of my favorite poems. I trust you will enjoy the words, pictures in your mind, and advice the poetry offers to Celebrate Weirdness at any age!

To My Children
By Laura Bernstein

Celebrate Weirdness!
Wine it and Dine it,
Design it to fit the occasion.
Rise to it.
Deny those who try to decry it
with scornful remarks and limited vision.

Elevate Eccentricity!
Beware the constricting, confining,
conventional congress of head shakers,
heartbreakers, nay sayers, soul slayers.
Dare to be Different.
Delight in it, Heighten it,
Make it your home.

Applaud Anomalies!
Anchor your ship in the
singular sea of uncertainty,
savor the strangeness.
Arrange bliss in whimsical patterns;
Irregular, quirky, quiet, murky
to those who are closed
to outlandish enchantments.

Cultivate Nonconformity!
Be weirdly wise with each enterprise.
Shrink from stale definitions and
pale reflections and pallid convictions.
Relish exotic delicacies of expanded views.
Tempt your palate with spicy spaciousness.

Celebrate Weirdness!
Walk in the wide path of surprises.
Hope rises above the horizon of
those who despise it;
who narrowly cut down to size
every dream seeking, scheme speaking
lover of magic.

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