Reflective Teaching, Day 29: Personal Growth

Day 29--How have you changed as an educator since you first started?

Timeline: August 1996. I walked into my first classroom (not counting student teaching). Bulletin boards were up, my desk was organized, my lesson plans were made, and I was nervous. I was filled with exhilaration and fear. Would I be good at this? Would the students pay attention? Would they learn? My fingers shook as I wrote my name on the board in anticipation of the students coming in. I had to erase my own name three times, at least, until it looked like an educated adult had written it. The bell rang, and students came into my classroom. Thus began the first day.

Fast forward eighteen years to August 2014. I walked into my new classroom. Bulletin boards were up, my desk was organized, my lesson plans were made, copies of my syllabus sat, stacked, ready for distribution. I was anxious and eager. I wondered if I were any good at this, whether my students would pay attention, and, most of all, if they would learn. Eighteen years later, and I still had to rewrite the information on the board several times before I was satisfied with how it looked. The bell rang, and students came into my classroom. Thus began the first day.

I have changed since I first started teaching, but I still have that thrill of nerves as I begin the year. I am more confident in my abilities. I use technology that didn't even exist when I started. I have grown in knowledge. My classroom management style has matured throughout the years. I'm a better facilitator, leader, and teacher. My teacher tool bag has grown, filled with tools gained at conferences, trainings, and loads of professional development hours.

Time has flown, and I hope that my skill set has grown with the years. My education philosophy of building cathedrals or searching for ponies has grown out of my experiences. I pray that I have become more adept at my calling. That's not to say I still don't have bad days when I am little more than a worker piling bricks or shoveling poo. I just have to continue to work with the knowledge that my Audience is more than my students, my peers, my administration, or even my community. If I can keep moving further up and in to the goal set before me, I hope to hear my Master say, "Well Done."

Reflective Teaching: Day 18, Teaching Philosophy

Day 18--Create a metaphor/simile/analogy that describes your teaching philosophy. For example, a “teacher is a ________…”

A teacher is a cathedral builder and a searcher for ponies.  I have written about my educational philosophy in my blog on a couple of occasions, so I'm going to just give links to those posts because tomorrow is potluck day at school, and I have to make my dishes to pass.  Happy reading!

Building Cathedrals

Searching for Ponies

Searching for Ponies...

A person once defined positivity this way:  two little girls were shown two identical rooms filled with... manure.  One little girl folded her arms, stuck out her bottom lip, and began crying.  The other little girl gasped and jumped into the room, digging into the nasty-smelling stuff with joyous abandon.  When she was asked why she was doing that, she replied: "Well, with all this poo, there must be a pony in here somewhere!"

Sometimes in education, what we have is a lot of poo. We have meetings.  We have meetings ABOUT meetings. We have deadlines.  We have ofttimes conflicting standards coming at us from the local, state, and federal governments.  We have to have 100% of our children at or above grade level in all areas.  We have to follow rules and regulations set down by school boards or government agencies who often don't know much about the daily business of teaching.  We have to make sure that each of the students is testing at high levels, even when those students don't care about the tests, because those test scores may determine whether or not we get rehired.  We have to create life-long learners out of students who only live in the moment.  We have to... well, shovel a lot of poo.

And no one likes to shovel poo.  I guess there could be a few people out there whose job it is to shovel poo around and they wake up each morning thinking... "Hooray! I get to shovel poo!".... but on the whole, none of us like that job.  It becomes exceedingly easy to complain about the smell, the grossness, the very baseness of the whole thing.

I can look at the pile of essays on my desk, the inbox a mile long, the calendar overflowing with IEP or 504 meetings during my prep time, and various and sundry required trainings and think, "How can I possibly get this all done and still have a life?"  I can fold my arms, stick out my bottom lip, and cry.  (And, to be honest, I sometimes I do...I don't claim to be Little Mary Sunshine all the time.)  OR I can take a deep breath and plunge in to all the muck with the hope that all this muck is just covering up the very real possibility that I will find a pony (metaphorically).

The pony we find in that educational muck might be the student who changes his attitude from apathetic to interested because he finally has a plan for his future after doing that research project.  Or we might find the pony in the girl who was so standoffish and rude but who has since become one of the sweetest girls in your class because you took that extra time to find out what was up with her and helped her through it.  It may take a lot of digging through poo to find, but if we're willing to put on our boots (sometimes hip-waders) and grab our shovels, we will find that all that hard, stinky, back-breaking work was worth it.

Building Cathedrals

    I suppose I am, in a way, a devotee of Maurice de Sully (for those who don't know, de Sully was the architect of Notre Dame Cathedral), but my reference is a little different.  "Build Cathedrals" means more than the building itself--which is a good thing because I am not an architect or a construction worker. 

    A couple of years ago I was at a teaching conference where this story was told:

    When a great cathedral was being built, workers from all around the countryside came to help in the construction, and the little children of the area could be seen watching the amazing structure rise from the formerly bare ground.  One little boy, watching three stonemasons, asked the first man what he was doing. 

    Seeing that the boy was curious, the man answered, "I'm laying bricks.  You take the bricks and lay them on the foundation; then you take the trowel and add the mortar that holds them together to all the sides that touch other bricks.  That's how you lay bricks."

    The boy moved on to the next mason, and asked him what he was doing.  The man said, "I'm building a wall.  You take the bricks and lay them on the foundation; then you take the trowel and add the mortar that holds them together to all the sides that touch other bricks.  That's how you build a wall."  The little boy nodded and moved on.

    He watched the third man, doing the exact same job as the other two--buttering bricks with mortar, laying them on top of the rows of bricks already there in the same way the others were doing.  He watched for a while, and then asked the third man what he was doing.  The third man looked at him with shining eyes.  "I'm building a cathedral."

    A second story that shaped my motto is similar to the first.  I read it in a book called Keeping a Princess Heart in a Not-So-Fairytale World the same summer I went to that conference.

    When St. Peter's in London was being built, a skilled woodworker/artisan was hired to create the ceiling joists for the building.  He could have just carved several rough beams out of the logs he was given, but he spent hours and hours on the joists--intricately carving flowers, gargoyles, images, etc. into the beams.  He was asked why he had spent so much time and effort adding all this artistic beauty and "wasting" his skill, especially since the ceiling joists were all to be covered up--no one would ever see them.  After he heard that--the part of no one ever seeing his work--he answered simply, "God will."

    The third man in the first story, although he was completing the same task as the other two men, had a greater vision than the other two.  He saw the end result of his labor, not just the labor itself.

    The artisan, although he was "simply" supposed to carve rough-hewn beams for the joists, had a greater understanding of audience than most.  He understood that he was working for God, not men.

    So I began to look at my job in light of those two epiphanies.  My job is more than just laying bricks (i.e. teaching lessons on grammar, making sure the students understand the story plotline, struggling to comprehend Shakespeare's language, etc.) and building walls (i.e. giving tests and checking mastery); I am building cathedrals (i.e. having a vision of what these kids COULD be).  My Audience notices the intricate details of my work--those things I do all the time and never get praised for, and/or those things I do to make my teaching better that no one will ever see--and is pleased.

    Some days I build cathedrals.  Some days I just lay brick.  But all the time I must remember that my vision and audience must be greater than what I can really do or see.