The first time I taught a cohesive lesson unit was when I truly realized education is an uphill battle.
I had always known it, in theory, from all the talks at school and all the conversations I had had with my mom about the "broken" system, but the first time I taught was the first time I felt the frustration and engaged in the messiness. The messiness of educating is not itself bad. In fact, education that is not messy is not education at all, in my mind. That is simply indoctrination. Learning ought to take struggle, from both our students and our teachers.
No, what is frustrating about teaching is often the surrounding elements-- the scripted curriculum -- the irrelevant assessment standards -- the unit focuses which so often ask us to teach students a book, and not literacy skills -- the time pressure -- the small tech problems that build up throughout the day -- your own insufficiency or lack of expertise on a subject. All of these are examples of the brokenness of teaching. We would like to think learning is a straight line, from A where we hold students' hands and help them draw a line to B. I would like to suggest it is a freaking black box though, where we drop lesson plans into a machine that churns out students navigating cultural competency, family life, personality changes, and varying motivations.
In the storm of what is called life, we can't perfect our teaching practice all at once. But we can't give up our determination to have a growth mindset, either.
After teaching my first lesson unit, I remember talking to my mother about all of the frustrations. I wasn't allowed to finish an important rhetorical study class assignment. I wasn't allowed to put the grades in the grade book. I had to teach Benjamin Franklin's 13 Aphorisms, for some reason, and a cohesive unit about the Founding Fathers which centered route knowledge and cultural learning over analytical or critical thinking skills.What my mom said to me in response has become my mantra as a teacher.
"You're not gonna be perfect overnight. But put your energy into one thing you can change, and make it better."
She said "Honey, you have to focus and change just one thing at a time. Everything that's wrong in a classroom isn't going to turn around in one day. You can't control most of what happens in that school and to those students. But you can control some things. You're just starting out. You're not gonna be perfect overnight. Put your energy into one thing you can change, and make it better."
When we engage in the messiness of educating, we will never be prepared enough or intelligent enough to teach it perfect. Although many people expect us to, we do not actually have control over most of the things which happen in our class and to our class. But we can control some things. As we move into a new season of educating, forcing all of us to start new in the ways we think about teaching, assessing, assigning, and communicating with students, I challenge all of us to find just the one thing for growth in your practice. What do you want to focus on this year?
What is it you want to focus on this year?
It could be your scaffolding strategy. It could be finding a way to incorporate a Restorative Justice model into your Classroom Management system. It could be stocking your library with diverse authors and protagonists. It could be converting your real-time classroom into a Google classroom. It could be incorporating formative assessment into your daily lesson plans. It could be finding a really good unit plan for teaching test-taking strategies. It could be creating that one unit that is project-based and challenges students to research a social problem and implement a solution. We are teachers. We are the stuff of ideas. But we can take a step down from the pedistool. We are still human. I believe younger teachers are particularly susceptible to trying to make teaching perfect, and more seasoned teachers are particularly susceptible to stop changing anything about their classrooms. But the problem with both of these mentalities is that it denies the reality of what education is.
It is messy. It is imperfect. It is growth.
This year I challenge all teachers to pick just one thing to change in their classroom. One year at a time, one struggle at a time, our entire school system can learn to do better.
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