November Blogging Challenge: Five lessons I'm grateful to have learned.

Day 14

Five things things you are grateful to have learned in your teaching career.

I have been a teacher for going on 18 years now, and I definitely have learned some great lessons that I continue to use to this day.

 I went to a conference session when I was student teaching.  It was about classroom management.  The speaker talked about the three types of classroom management styles. The first is a brick wall: this type of teacher rigidly follows every rule to such an extent that the students have no chances for mercy.  The second is a jellyfish: this type of teacher lets the students run free until finally the havoc causes the teacher to snap his/her "stingers" at the kids.  The third is a backbone: this type of teacher has both rigidity and flexibility; he or she follows the rules but understands that sometimes a little lee-way is in order.  A backbone can bend but it won't break and snap under the pressure of a bad day.  That conference helped solidify my belief about classroom management: I wanted to have a backbone kind of classroom management style...one that is strong enough support the rules, but also one that is flexible enough to allow a little freedom of expression.

Another lesson I'm grateful to have learned is twofold: first, teachers really do have the ability to change the lives of their students.  I had a student once who came back to tell me about how I'd helped him.  I wrote about it in the blog post "Homecoming."  The other half of the lesson is that our students change our lives, too.  I cannot count the ways the students have changed my life.  I've learned more from them, I think, than I've taught them.  I am blessed by the ways that my students have helped me see life from their perspective.


 A third thing I'm grateful to have learned over my career is the priceless lesson of how important it is to work together as a team.  Too often we teachers work in isolation, our classrooms becoming a little kingdom.  But when I learned about Professional Learning Communities I found a way to work together like the states do with the Federal government.  Instead of being an entity unto myself, I was able to gain insight and help from others who knew ways to do things I didn't and was able to give insight and help to those who needed my knowledge.




Another lesson I'm grateful to have learned is that every obstacle is an opportunity to grow.  When I deal with a student who is unruly, I can focus on the behavior that is frustrating me, or I can try to understand where that behavior is coming from.  There's always a silver lining; if I have to redo my curriculum (again) to match up with new standards (or just renamed standards), then that is an opportunity to add something.  I just need to Search for Ponies.

Lots of things in education today can be trying and upsetting, but when we come together with the same goals in mind, we can affect change.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” ― Margaret Mead.  I'm grateful to have learned this lesson because I'm reminded that my job is not just a job; it is a calling.

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.