"Much more than passion projects, 20Time projects serve a real purpose to meet the needs of clients, audiences, and customers. True passion follows purpose." (Brookhouser, 2015)
Setting the Foundation
As I began week 1 of my #20Time project, which is to get healthy and share that knowledge with fellow educators, I first went to the questions that inspired this project. (See brainstorming questions in post dated ) The first question was "How do we find time to take care of ourselves in a profession that emphasizes putting students first?" As teachers, this has to be the primary reason we tend to forget about ourselves. In addition to our craft and student responsibilities, lets throw in family responsibilities as well (quality time, finances, parenthood, etc). These responsibilities are time consuming, in a good way, because you're doing things that you love to do but how can we do all of this and take care of ourselves as well? Balance, planning and educating ourselves.
Calories, Fat, Carbohydrates & Protein
My first step was to find out how many calories I needed per day. I went to Youtube and entered "how to track calories?" I ended up finding a video introducing a free app for my Iphone called "Loseit!" ""Lose It" helps you set a daily calorie budget, track your meals, exercise, and to stay motivated and make smarter choices and achieve your goal." (First, you setup an account by entering your age, current weight and your personal goals (15lbs, 20lbs, etc). Based on this information, the app will give you an estimate of how many calories you need to take in per day. Your job is to stay under that. I also learned about macronutrients as the app helps with the tracking of this. Macronutrients are nutrients that provide calories or energy. There are three broad classes of macro-nutrients: proteins, carbohydrates, and fats." (Macronutrients, 2004) To keep it simple-proteins help you maintain muscle growth, carbohydrates give the body energy and fats can also give you energy but should be limited. For this project, I'm tracking and will attempt to diversify my macronutrients in the following way: 20% fats, 40% carbohydrates and 40% proteins.
The Balancing Act
I began my challenge on Monday (of course) as all challenges and diets begin on Mondays, right? In all seriousness, don't look at it as a diet, more of a lifestyle as these eating habits should be long-term. I began my day by spending quality time with my wife. We're early risers so we took a trip to the beach at 6am. This is part of the balancing act, sometimes we can't get to the gym because we have other responsibilities but taking walks on the beach burns calories. The key is to stay active and if you can spend quality time at the same time, win win. I decided to take the day off from the gym on this day anyways as I was able to go over the weekend so I decided to make sure I stayed active in a different way. Below, labeled "food intake", is an example of my lose it app and how I logged in my meals. My budget was 1,653 calories, which means I cannot go over this. I ended up eating 1,632 calories and lost about 400 calories by exercising. I believe I went for a jog. The second image shows my macronutrients (fats, carbs, proteins) breakdown for the day. As long as I keep the fats down and the carbohydrates and proteins somewhat the same, I met my goal for the day.
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After great feedback from fellow classmates, I decided to go with the fitness blog option. The purpose of this fitness blog is to come from the perspective of a teacher. Its about the everyday grind of teaching and how we pour into others while forget about ourselves. As I walk around campus and as we get together in the teachers lounge, I observe and listen to teachers talk about their struggles with weight. Many times it's blamed on the busy-ness of teaching and the constant snacking at school. At our school, we have many potlucks and ways to get teachers together through eating. We have taco Thursdays every week-teachers rotate and bring either beef or chicken to make tacos. Friday feast is every month where every grade level has a turn providing food and sweets throughout the year. There are days when someone out of the kindness of their heart supplies the teachers with doughnuts in the teachers lounge. Trust me, I'm not complaining but it can be very tough to stay healthy and feel good about ourselves when we're surrounded by all this frosted goodness. This is in addition to whatever is stored in our cabinets at home, holidays and family festivities where we tend to over do it.
I plan on sharing my journey with photos, blogs, videos and any tools I find that will assist me in reaching my personal goals, which is to be fit and healthy so I can be at my best during the day to day grind of teaching. I will be sharing my struggles, successes and hopefully a transformation by the end of week 5 but importantly tools I can share with others. Since we're currently off for the summer, I'm hoping this is the start of a health committee that can be incorporated into our school for the upcoming 2015-2016 school year as I truly feel the health of teachers is a priority. I can't wait to get started. 20 Time "Solving wicked problems takes time. It takes hundreds, even thousands of baby steps along the way." (Brookhouser, 2014) When I first heard hear of the 20 Time project through our graduate course, I immediately felt excitement. Ever since 2010, I've been diving into a lot of reading. Mostly self-development books such as the Power of Now, the Power of Positive Thinking, fitness books, finances, etc. I try to work on things or weakness I find within myself and I do my best to improve on those flaws. Since I've been doing this for a while and slowly but surely getting out of my comfort zone, I didn't know exactly what to do my project on. I know I want to help others with a certain project and I know I want it to be something that takes me out of my comfort zone. The Bad Idea Factory Then I began to read the 20 Time Project by Kevin Brookhouser to understand the concept thoroughly and help guide me toward a project. Initially, the ideas that came to me were good ideas I believe but I just didn't feel like it was time to pursue any of these. (See "Bad Idea Factory" below) I believe in trying new things and immersing myself but I also believe in timing. To get the thoughts flowing, I would go for a run or go to the gym just to get away and let the project come to me. Proposal #1
I As I was working out on a Sunday, I had another idea that I have had for some time. As teachers, we constantly pour into others and help our students to the best of our abilities. We invest so much time and energy into our craft that we tend to forget about ourselves. We stay in our classroom hours after that students have been dismissed just to grade papers, prepare for the next day, clean, decorate, make copies and many more responsibilities we have as teachers. Unfortunately, this takes us away from taking care of ourselves. So, my 20 Time Project is to create an awareness and the understanding that as busy as we are, there is always time to take care of ourselves. Not just during our vacations, during the grind of the school year as well. Personally, I've struggled with my weight my entire life. It wasn't until I began my teaching career that I was finally able to take some time to take care of myself and it was during my first summer vacation. I immersed myself into countless hours of YouTube videos about nutrition and workout regimens. I began with a lot of trial and error and still going through it as I type this paper. I feel healthy but I still have a lot of work to do to reach my personal goals so I want to share that journey with fellow educators. I am 5'7 inches tall and currently weigh 170 lbs and want to lose about 10-15 lbs but more than just losing weight, I want to reach goals that sometimes we feel are impossible due to our hectic calendar or profession. Questions 1. How do we find time to take care of ourselves in a profession that emphasizes putting students first? 2. How does stress impact our nutritional decisions and overall health? 3. Should I start a committee or a group at some point? 4. Is the lack of time the reason for choosing convenience over the best foods? 5. In a profession where we spend so much of our personal finances on our students and classroom, how does personal finances affect our nutritional decisions? 6. Teaching takes a lot of our time away from our family, does this balancing act affect our nutrition and physical activity? 7. Will people be accepting of a health/fitness community? 8. Will it be easy for teachers to accept that they need help? 9. Is there a lack of knowledge regarding health? 10. Is there a lack of support at home? Proposal #2 My second proposal is to start a toy drive in the community I work in. I work for a title 1 school, all of our kids qualify for free to reduced lunches. In the 5 years I have worked in this community, I've noticed the need for good news and hope. Our school has experienced numerous lock downs in my time there due the high crime activity in the neighborhood. I would love to create moments of joy for families by starting a toy drive for the Christmas season. Questions 1. Do I need to register or apply for a permit to hold a toy drive? 2. Do I need sponsors? 3. If I choose a church to team up with, will my school be open to that? 4. Will my school be open to a toy drive? 5. Do I go to the district first or ask our principal? 6. Are there start up costs? 7. Will I be able to get a toy drive started by this year? 8. What is the best way to advertise an event like this? 9. How do I go about asking for toy donations? 10. How do I get volunteers to help with the drive? Timeline Losing weight too quickly can be just as harmful as putting on the extra weight so I want to lose about a pound per week so hopefully in about 2 months, I will be very close to my goal. I want to lead by example because I believe people watch what you do, not what you say. I want to share this process with the use of technology, blogging, taking a before and after picture of myself and consistently post YouTube vlogs about my experiences, practices, trials and successes. References Brookhouser, K. (2014). The 20time project: How educators can launch Google's formula for future-ready innovation. San Bernardino, California: 20time.org. |
Jaime Gonzalez
This page is dedicated to my 20Time project for graduate class EDL680 at SDSU. Archives
August 2015
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