No Soup For You!

"All Mine" photo by:Blue Moonbeam Studio

For the past year, I have been diligently piecing together the middle school Spanish curriculum. It is a labor of love that has taken more time than I ever imagined.

This morning, I received an email from a Spanish teacher at nearby school (a “competitor” for the same students) requesting a copy of our middle school curriculum. She had begun the same process and was interested in what I was doing. My immediate thought was, “Is she kidding me? If I give her this, then it’s like I’ve done all her work for her. No way!” It was a gut response of which I’m not especially proud. Even after one and a half years of blogging and tweeting, my first thought was to hoard. #fail

I keep forgetting that we all are on the same team. Last I checked there isn’t a limit on how many kids are allowed to learn to speak Spanish. So, in my second breath, I arranged for her to come, observe and talk about what I’m up to.

In order to start sharing more freely we need to get over the idea that we are doing other people’s work for them. Instead, we should think of sharing content and thoughts as doing our part to further the greater work. Credit will always come where credit is due. We don’t have to worry about that. But the best part is, that when we add our pieces together, we get the opportunity to mix, mash, shred, supplement, and develop something even better than we could have imagined on our own.