The International Day of Peace: high school style.

Friday was the International Day of Peace, so my elective class, the Peace Leadership League, set up activities for the week within our school day and stepped into classrooms to lead them. One of the goals of the week was to be more mindful of our actions and do random acts of service, which students throughout the school kept track of on little slips of construction paper, and then we made a long chain  and hung them up in the front of our school. It wasn't a super huge event, but I was so proud of my students, especially when we sat in a circle around all of the little random acts of service and they shared out what it felt like to become a peace leader on campus all week. I have this quote that I like to share with my students from Gandhi, "If we are to teach real peace in this world... we shall have to begin with the children." This idea is essentially why I decided to go back to classroom teaching after grad school, but in reality, if we are to reach real peace in the world, we only have to have the children teach us. 

That first photo was my view of the sunrise outside my classroom on the International Day of Peace, which was an inspiring way to begin the day. Sometimes there are special rewards for waking up before the sun.