A quick blurb about me:

My name is Rod Hopkins and I currently teach math at Thomas Worthington High School I am in my 14th year at TW and 19 years overall in the classroom. Through the course of my career I’ve had the opportunity to teach middle school math as well as courses relating to Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2 and Financial Algebra. I have been the head varsity football coach at our school and currently I am coaching the varsity girls golf team. This year I was invited to become a member of our district’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Team and I hope to continue that work moving forward. Outside of the school day my hobbies include playing golf, coaching my kids’ youth sports team and occasionally home brewing.

What is the meaning of 1 + 2?

This blog is actually something I wanted to get going midway through the 2017-2018 school year which was the first time in years I wasn’t coaching football. When I first sat down to get things started I convinced myself that I needed a proofreader for punctuation and grammatical errors. When I couldn’t find anyone to commit I dropped the idea. The following school year I picked up a new prep and began coaching golf so the timing just wasn’t right. So here we are at the halfway point of the 2019-2020 school year and I’m fresh out of excuses so I figured let’s roll with it !

So to answer the question ‘What is the meaning of 1 + 2?’ well don’t forget I’m a math guy so numbers are more my wheelhouse than words. Anyways, on any given day I’ve had conversations with colleagues in the building (and the district) or with friends at a happy hour who are also educators in other districts. The one thing I felt was always the driving force of our work conversations was negativity towards the profession. The negativity wasn’t isolated to one specific thing but included building and district admin, students, parents and sometimes all of the above.

Remember at the time I was half way through my first year out of coaching football when I wanted to start doing this blog. There I was now listening to these conversations but personally having the best school year of my career. I had gained a ton of time back from coaching to dedicate to my wife and kids, I was coaching my daughter’s soccer team and I was teaching a class (financial algebra) that I had developed an absolute passion for. I used to add quite a bit of negativity to these conversations, but that particular year I was experiencing so much positiveness that listening to other’s negativity became unpleasant and sometimes draining. To try to help combat the negative I started forcing myself to always leave the building on a daily basis with a positive thought because I really was enjoying the year THAT much.

Each day as I’d be wrapping up for the day I would try to ask myself “what is one positive conversation, interaction or moment that I had today?” regardless of how good or bad a day it was. As I continued doing this I felt like I would get home feeling better, more likely to workout and started doing a better job of leaving work at work. So from that question I decided the mathematical expression of 1 + 2 would be a great representation of my 1 positive (+) 2day!

Full disclosure I still don’t have a proofreader. However, in my factual opinion a missed comma, misused semi-colon or any other grammatical errors that may occur just isn’t enough for me not to reflect. It is my hope to be able to share these multiple times a week and I hope you’re able to use my positives to begin to see more of your own in a career that can sometimes be physically, mentally, psychologically and emotionally exhausting.

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