Is Balance Possible?

The beginning of the new school year has come and gone and it’s around this time I start to see droopy faced students and teachers roaming the hallways.  How can it be that people are already looking so tired by week 5 of the school year?  So it’s not surprising that as teachers and administrators, it’s right about now that we start to talk more and more about finding balancing in our lives.  But is balance possible?

The oddity of schools is that by their nature they’re not balanced.  In what other industry do people work from dawn to dusk for 9-10 months of the year and then have little to no work to do in the off season?  As the descendant of a midwest farming family (many of whom still work the field), farmers are some of the only other people I know who have the same schedule, which isn’t a coincidence.  My dad was a farmer, so I distinctly remember the late nights he’d work in the fall, trying to get all the crops harvested, and the cold winters when I’d come home from school to see my dad had rearranged the basement…again.

Maybe balance is so elusive because it doesn’t really exist…at least not in the form we’re searching for.  If asked to define balance some would probably interpret it to mean managing the time in your life to allow for a variety of challenging, innovative and diverse activities.  Although that quick definition could also mean that we should try not to be too challenged, innovative or diversified.  That doesn’t seem right, does it?  I can’t imagine anyone telling a student that their activities are too innovative.

In 2011 when Jakarta International School redeveloped its school wide vision and values they included “Balance” in addition to 6 other values, which also includes fun.  JIS interpreted Balance to be “Striving to achieve physical, intellectual, and emotional harmony in our lives and our decisions.”

Harmony sounds like a better definition then I came up with, but it says nothing about time management and slowing down, and perhaps that’s the point.

Maybe instead of using the word balance or even harmony, we should strive to be and create schools that are always purposeful.  Now that may seem a little cynical since everyone comes to school for a purpose, but that doesn’t mean everything we do has a good purpose.  Whether as a teacher or administrator I think we would do much for creating ‘balance’ if before asking something of others we first asked ‘What’s the purpose?’  Not just the obvious superficial purpose, but the deep purpose–the one tied to our visions for the school.

This also means that we can’t always interpret balance based on how busy we are in a day.  Although there are times in the year where we need to spend more time with our families and not working, there is also time for the opposite.  Either way what we’re doing has purpose.  This idea is similar to what a head of school told me last week during an interview.  Simply put, there are times when it’s ok to work your butt off, and time when little work is perfect, as long as there is a purpose.

For teachers it might make us rethink what we’re demanding of our students.  Do we have purpose in everything we demand of our students?  Or are we making them jump through hoops with an obscure purpose.  Now some of you might say ‘but hoops are a part of life.’  That might be true in some cases, but I’d rather be on the side of eliminating hoops, freeing minds, and defining purpose.

So what do you think, is balance possible?