Do OCD Moments Matter?

OCD, quirks, whatever you would like to call them, we all have them. Sheldon Cooper may be the current king of OCD. I also thought of Monica from Friends and her moments. I mean she has a label for the label maker!

My train of thought stumbled upon some of my own quirks this morning and I got to thinking more about them. Are they things that I can over come? Do they really matter?

I was thinking about my SOL challenge in my classroom and how on Monday I am going to give the ones who wrote their slices over the weekend a sticker. Would I let them pick what sticker they wanted, or would I control what sticker they picked? I like to use one sheet of stickers at a time and use them as they come on the sheet. (As I type this, I am thinking how silly this sounds! They are stickers for cryin' in the night!)

Another example, back in December we had a high intensity situation at school and the whole day was spent with the teachers just trying to make sure that the students felt safe. At one point some of my students asked if they could draw on the board. I despise students drawing on my board. They always manage to make a mess out of it and there is always a lighter color marker that is now stained a darker color when they are finished. Yet that day, I knew that they needed to have that moment, so I sucked it up and let them and tried not to watch.

You know what, I lived through it. My markers weren't destroyed and the board was easily cleaned after they went home.

It wasn't that big of a deal, and neither will the choice of sticker they use.

In one of my favorite books by Sharon Creech, one lesson learned by the characters is:

"In the course of a lifetime, what does it matter?"

Does it matter in a week if they used the fifth sticker on the sheet and not the next one in line? Does it matter in a month if the orange marker has a little blue in it when it writes?

Nope, the marker still writes what I want to write on the board and the sticker did it's job at rewarding the student. 

I am going to try to remind myself of this lesson whenever I want to cringe and say no to something that might be an OCD/quirk moment, because in the course of a lifetime, it probably doesn't really matter.

What is one of your OCD/quirks? Can you overcome it?