I Hurt Someone's Feelings by Accident. Here's What I Did Next

We weren't even a full week into the school year when I got a wake-up call.

At meet and greet, I said something I thought was building a relationship. It wasn't until someone else told me that I found out it had landed the opposite way. My first instinct was to defend myself. My second — thankfully — was to go fix it.

This week's STRONG Teacher Report is about that moment, plus four things I'm carrying into this school year and this week's journaling prompt. Watch it here:

Prefer to listen instead? The audio version is on the Why Edify podcast too.

Own it. Repair it. Let it go.

That's the whole practice, really. You do what you can — apologize, clarify, show up differently next time — and then you have to let it go. As a teacher, you're making hundreds of small decisions and having hundreds of small interactions every day. Some of them are going to land the wrong way. The goal isn't zero mistakes. It's noticing, repairing, and not letting one rough moment write the story of your whole year.

A few other things on my mind this week

Beware the shiny new tool. I almost went hunting for a new system for my parent communication log. Then I realized I already had the tools I needed sitting in my Google Drive. Pick one thing. Learn it well. Resist the urge to keep shopping for a better system when the one you have would work fine if you used it.

Paper is making a comeback in my classroom. Not instead of screens — alongside them. I'm leaning further into interactive notebooks this year because I think some of the best thinking still happens with a pen in hand.

Traditions matter more than we give them credit for. Our school's guy-teachers' trip to the Hong Kong Buffet is silly and a little too much food every time, and it's also one of the things that makes the job good. What's yours?

This week's newsletter: What are you saying yes to?

This week's STRONG Teacher Newsletter is built around a line from Elena Aguilar's Onward: saying no is liberating. Every yes is a no to something else — often to the things that actually recharge you. Early in the year is the best time to get clear on your high-quality no's before your calendar fills in around you.

Your turn: the five-second moment

Here's this week's journaling prompt: What was your five-second moment today — the exact second something shifted, good or bad, big or small? It doesn't have to be about teaching.

Drop your answer in the comments. And if you've got a least-favorite task as a teacher or administrator, I want to hear that one too.

This is a STRONG Teacher Report — informal, unscripted, just me thinking out loud about what I'm working on. If that's useful, the STRONG Teacher Newsletter goes out every Wednesday.