Stay Humble

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” – Nelson Mandela

One weakness I used to have was that I thought I knew everything. Then I made a career change, became a teacher, and found out very quickly there was a lot I still had to learn. In order to learn what I needed to, I realized I had to acknowledge that there were some gaps missing in my knowledge in order to be successful. Once I admitted there were gaps, I looked for ways to start to fill them. Realizing I had a lot to learn allowed me to learn more. In order to learn, we must stay humble. This is an idea I want to start teaching my students: that in order to learn something, they must first realize they need to learn it. That’s where humility comes in. Realizing that we don’t know everything opens us up to learn something new. Then we have to want to learn something new. Step one is realizing we don’t know it all, and step two is wanting to know more about what we don’t understand. Learning something new is how we grow as people and understand more about the world around us.

Whenever we visit somewhere, I try to learn as much about that location as I can. I look at the information plaques and ask some of the local people there questions about it. Most people are willing to share more about where they live and what they do. The family and I took a trip to Northeast Georgia during spring break. We spent most of our time in Helen, Georgia. We walked around the main strip the day before, and the next day we took a trip to Tallulah Gorge. On the way to the gorge, we stopped at some fun places. One of the first places we stopped was the Nora Mill Granary Grist Mill. Established in 1876 in Helen, Georgia, the Nora Mill Granary is a historic, water-powered grist mill on the Chattahoochee River that produces stone-ground grits, cornmeal, and flour using 1,500-pound French Burr Mill Stones. You can watch the granary in action while you are at the store. You can see the Chattahoochee River from the back porch of the store. Here are the photos that I captured of it from the back of the store.