Met or Not Met

On January 1, the pull-off quote calendar looks so thick, so full of pages. You tear off January 1, then comes January 2, and going back to work after the break is right in front of you.

On September 26, the calendar is getting thin. The stores are full of Halloween items, and the Christmas creep has begun. The days are getting cooler. The NFL and college football are heating up, and the baseball playoffs are about to start. Pumpkin products fill the stores and coffee shops. Fall has arrived.

Back to the calendar. Its thinning reminds me that the year is coming to a close, and then thoughts of the new year begin to take up occupancy in my mind. With them come thoughts of goals, dreams, and aspirations. And with those comes a question: do I really need new goals? The current ones seem fine.

My mind drifts to my career as an educator, and I think this: our years are like an IEP. You have an annual once a year, every three years is your triennial, and if you need something in the middle, you call for an amendment.

At the annual, you discuss present levels of performance, strengths, and weaknesses, then progress on the previous goals. You basically say met or not met, and if not met, you state a reason. Then you introduce new goals. An unwritten rule of IEPs is that if you don't meet a goal, you don't give the same one again. There really isn't a good explanation for this. It probably has something to do with lawsuits.

For those of you who aren't familiar with IEPs, the point is that the goals exist to help a learner access the curriculum when a disability is getting in the way.

So, back to our goals. At this point in the year, assess your progress on the goals you set. One thing you can learn from an IEP is this: the goals set in that meeting are good for a year. They're reviewed at each meeting, and you say met or not met, and why. You can't walk into a meeting and say you forgot the goals, or that you didn't work on them.

But we do this. Do we let ourselves off the hook for not meeting a goal? Do we act like we forgot them?

I bet you wrote your goals down somewhere last December. Go back, look at them, and answer the question: met or not met? Then set your intention for the upcoming year.

The calendar will only get thinner, and soon you'll be caught up in a goal-creating frenzy. But instead of writing goals to have something to say at your holiday gathering, keep them for the entire next year.

What goal from this year have you stopped looking at?

Here, I made this. My gift to you, for taking the time to read.

Images are from my imagination, generated by AI. Writing is all me.