Teaching our students about Personal Responsibility.

Teaching our students about Personal Responsibility.

For many, taking personal responsibility for the events and occurrences in their lives is easy. These people are highly successful and only rely on excuses some of the times.

However, for most, excuses are a part of their lives. For most people, excuses are a belief system handed down from generation to generation and we now pass that bad habit to our children.

To take total personal responsibility is something most people just cannot or will not do. We have been led to believe that excuses, good excuses, really do exist. That is not true in fact nothing could be further from the truth.

What is personal responsibility? It sounds like a dumb question right. Don’t people know what personal responsibility is? Nevertheless, even though most people know what personal responsibility is, most people have a difficult time taking responsibility for their lives.

We ourselves have made too many excuses. People do not take personal responsibility for being late at an appointment they instead blame traffic. We do not take personal responsibility when we are mean to our children. We say they led us to it by behavior. We do not take personal responsibility for our weight when we go to the fast food place rather than feed our family a healthy meal. We say it is more convenient. Those are all lies we are telling ourselves.

Regrettably, we have passed on the legacy to our children that say excuses are okay. We make them ourselves and our children bear witness. Then, we wonder why they tell us excuse after excuse as to why they can’t or Won’t do what needs to be done.

You see our students have a job. They are expected to go to school and learn. Students are expected to increase their knowledge. They are supposed to put information from eye and ear to brain and memory and absorb the information to the point that they can explain what they have learned.

This past year I had the privilege to help a couple of homeschool families with some homeschooling. Although, for the most part, I enjoyed the experience one thing I did not enjoy was the students use the lack of personal development, lack of spirit of excellence and the amount of excuses.

They would come in late and say I overslept because my alarm did not go off. They would come in without supplies and ask around, disrupting the class and explain that again they forgot pencil or paper. They never were prepared for the lesson because there was always and excuse as to why they could not get the assignments done. I kept thinking to myself, wow. How are these kids ever going to get things done in life if everything is an excuse?

Then, the parents started making up excuses. We stayed up late and they overslept. Oh, I forgot to see if he had all his stuff. Oh, we went to the movies so he could not do his work. Well, they are homeschool they are not used to this. WHAT? I do not give a fig that they are homeschool. You mean they can’t get a paper and pencil into a backpack and come to school. That is a huge big excuse.

It was evident to me then that this was not where I want to be. I do not want to make excuses for events in my life and I certainly do not want to pass the excuse legacy off to my children. I want them to take personal responsibility. I want to show them how.

To me education is more than learning our ABC’s. It is learning about personal development. Teaching our children how to take responsibility is one of the greatest gifts we can give them.