The One About Ants

Ants are fascinating creatures.  They are much like us, incredibly social creatures living in groups of such order and organisation.  Intelligent and intuitive.  Hardworking.  Always busy.  You might not be able to pick them out in the photo above that I took earlier today but they are there.  I was watching a game of rugby and looked down at the ground.  Everywhere I looked there were ants.  And thus tonight's post was born (amazing where you can find inspiration!).

As I watched the little creatures scuttling furiously from place to place I thought of how an entire world was right down by my feet and I could hardly see it.  I looked closer and saw them changing direction, ducking into holes and under grass, carrying things.  They were busy, very busy indeed.  But unless I looked down, directly down, really hard I would never have see them.

I started thinking about how our schools and workplaces can be like this.  Everyone working furiously, often undetected or noticed unless someone looks hard enough to see what's actually there.  People who have jobs to do, hundreds of small (or large) tasks to complete, places to go and things to achieve.  

My school is very much like the ants.  We are a small group of dedicated educators who work so very hard.  We constantly push ourselves and each other to be better practitioners, to become more knowledgeable and skilled.  We all have jobs to do, often completing these jobs without the awareness of others.  Quietly going about our hundreds of tasks which make the school run seamlessly, smoothly.  

Unless you are a teacher you often don't realise the work that goes into moulding the next generation into successful learners.  Parents often joke about how it must be the greatest job in the world (and it is, don't get me wrong) because of all the weekends and holidays we have off.  Yeah right I hear you all laugh.  Teachers are the hardest working group of anyone I know.  People outside of the education field can be forgiven for making such judgements.  Just as we don't realise the importance of each of the ants in their scurrying madness at our feet.  Each job or task making the colony run like clockwork.  

So to all the teachers, Principals, educators out there...  this post has been about the ants... and about us.  Keep up the amazing work.  Even if no one sees it.  It is all worth it, our kids are worth it.

Here are a couple of really cool facts I found about ants tonight (courtesy of http://antark.net/)...

• Ants worst enemies are not humans, but other ants (much like us humans being our own worst enemies!).
• Ants have two stomachs - one for food for themselves, one for food for others (kind of gross but sweet at the same time).
• Dozens of colonies of the world's smallest ant could live in the brain case of the world's largest ant (not sure how I feel about this - sounds like a horror movie theme if you ask me).
• The total weight of all the ants in the world is the same as, if not larger than the weight of all the humans in the world (fearing a takeover anyone??).