ALIVE! SHE'S ALIVE!

This year has been insane.  I've been pushed hard and stretched thin, and I have not had much time to reflect.  My focus as a second year instructor has been on the practical aspects of educating; procedures for a productive room, incentive structures, exit ticket trackers, etc.  I have also taken on a lot more responsibility for whole-campus tasks such as planning various field trips and creating units of curriculum on subjects like debate and story-telling.  This has been a wonderful experience, and I feel like I have grown immensely as a teacher and a professional.  Now I need to learn how to balance that with thinking about why I do this work and what kind of teacher I want to be.

This week I finally had the chance to sit down and look over my 1.5 years of blog posts.  I'm shocked by how much I have already learned and grown since my first post.  I'm also shocked and a little disappointed by how many times I read an old post and thought, "ooooh, that's why I do that," or, "wow, I've really lost sight of that."  My focus for the coming year is going to be to find more of a balance between practice and reflection. 

One area of thought and practice where I feel I have made some actual headway is around the issue of trust in the classroom.  Questions surrounding trust and belief have been a reoccurring theme in my posts:

           How do I empower students to take chances?

           How do I show students that failure is not an end point but rather a step in the process?

           How do I balance the needs of different students so they all feel supported?

           Where should the greatest portion of my attention be directed, towards students who are already
           motivated to learn or towards students who have yet to find that motivation?  Do I have to choose?

What I have learned this year is that creating a safe and supportive classroom is more dependent on the culture of my room than the planning I put in to my lessons.  Students need to feel like they can be successful.  Some students come to my classroom having already experienced plenty of success.  They are the students whose hands eagerly launch from their desks whenever you ask, "What do you think about...?" or "Does anyone have any questions?"  Then there are the students who have not experienced as much success.  Either the will to learn, the skills needed to learn, or both have been absent from their educational experience in the recent past.  These students are either lethargic or are attempting to highjack the class.

My greatest area of growth this year has been in recognizing students who are not motivated to take academic chances in my room and helping them to find their academic strengths.  I've used many skills and strategies that have been very effective, but what I find most striking is also what probably should have been most obvious.

My students start trying because they realize I am never going to stop trying.

It is both touching and inspiring to me to see how their attitudes change when they figure out that I am going to continue to care and to try no matter how much resistance I'm met with or how much they might be struggling.  Until this year, I never really realized the impact a teacher can have when students know that no matter what happens, that teacher will still expect big things from them and will still care deeply about them as people.  Its difficult, it takes patience, and I'm definitely not perfect in my resolve just yet.  Still, it is reaffirming to me as an educator to know that if you hold out the rose petal, students will eventually sniff!  If you show that you care, your sparkle can respark the "dull gray dots of apathy".  If you make sure students know that you think they are making unfortunate choices but you maintain your belief that they are smart and good hearted people, they will eventually begin to believe it too.

So I keep hoping. 

And I keep working on being as patient, consistent, and caring as I can be.  Now, I need to learn how to pair that demeanor with high expectations and rigorous curriculum.  I need to work on how to use the supportive environment I am getting better at creating to push my students to grow academically.  Needless to say, I still have a lot of work to do.

It's just nice to know that all this time, I've been on the right track.  Its re-energizing to think that my early notions about teaching, though idealistic and not fully-fleshed out, were not totally out of the ballpark or completely naive.  Hopefully when I look back 5, 10, 15 years from now, I am still saying the same.