Break it Down

I'm a Pinterest addict. It's so cliche and slightly embarrassing to admit, but I'm honest by nature. I genuinely use it for inspiration, lesson plans, work out ideas, and even recipes (yea, I've actually been cooking... but that's for another post). This morning, I read this:

What initially caught my attention was the quotation by Albert Einstein. "The world as we have created, it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be created without changing our thinking." Wow. I wonder what it would be like to swim around in his brain. 

I've been thinking a lot about the processes we go through. Not just the daily routines, but our thought processes. I often have students ask the inevitable question, "Why do I need to know this?" I have adopted the saying, "It's about creating a learning process. You are learning how to think." I realize that many of them do not love literature and writing, and, to be frank, they won't need to know literary elements in their daily lives. What they do need to know is the process of how to think and make decisions. Literature and the writing process are great tools in attaining these skills. 

Number eight on this list says, "The impossible looking aerial view of a big project. Break it down into smaller parts, a bunch of little, achievable ones." This is exactly what we need to do each day. We all want to know the big picture. We all want to know why we "need to learn this." The fact is, that we don't know the big picture, and we never will. What we can see are the little, attainable goals that we set throughout the day. Those steps help take us to where we need to be; they are each important. We all need to learn how to break it down.