Weekly Challenges

When I was in 3rd grade I was in a class called Tier 4. It was one of my favorite (and continued to be one of my favorites) classes in elementary school. There were only 6 (yes 6!) of us in a class. 5 girls and one boy (poor Joel...). We had these assignments once a week called "Weekly Challenges" and they were the DEVIL as far as I was concerned. They were assignments that we were meant to work on through the entire week and then turned in on Friday morning.

And they were homework assignments- so no help from the teacher essentially. We were supposed to work on them on our own.

But they were impossibly hard. I can remember EVERY THURSDAY NIGHT sitting down with my mom and Bob and working on these assignments while we watched Mad About You and Seinfeld.

I had a love hate relationship with my teacher Mrs. Shoop- I loved her when we were reading or writing in class or when we would get special privileges because of our small class size, but on Thursday nights during Must See TV, I HATED her.

I've always thought about those assignments and how challenging they were even to my mom and Bob and how my poor little 3rd grade brain was having a hard time keeping up... but they were good. I learned. I problem solved and I struggled and I had to look in dictionaries and encyclopedias and in newspapers. I learned so much during those assignments.

And it's time for me to learn some more. I mean, I'm growing in ways every day and I'm about to be seriously challenged in terms of my job, but I want to grow in more ways than that.

So I'm going to start my own form of Weekly Challenges. I want to challenge myself with something new or foreign or hard every week. Starting with TODAY.

My first Weekly Challenge is to write on my blog every day in the next week. That's completely doable.

And in one of those posts, I have to outline the next month of Weekly Challenges.

They will probably differ each week and won't always be something I have to do EVERY DAY, but it will be fun and hopefully I'll learn something from these like I did from the ones in 3rd Grade. :)

*By the way, Mrs. Shoop- you rocked during 3rd grade and I have AWESOME memories of Tier 4 with you!