Please don’t just do what you are supposed to do…
I have taken 15 students up to the Northeast Regional Conference on the Social Studies for the last few years. They attend as members as the staff and are equal participants in the sessions.
Every year I come back rejuvenated that all great teaching is a call to action. Everything we have done during the year has led up to this. Everything we have talked about that wasn’t in the curriculum, every activity we did that could have been a worksheet or multiple choice test, everything that they struggled through and solved on their own instead of me giving them the steps to follow, and the rubric to tell them what was right and wrong. It wasn’t what we were “supposed to be doing” that leads to their success. When they return for a visit and recall what we did that is allowing them to be successful in high school it was not what we “were supposed to be doing.”
In school we have begun to receive our common core aligned units. They focus on content. They focus on skills. They focus on the common core standards. What they ask me to do is easy. Cover a topic. Learn a skill. Nail a standard. There are a 100 books that you can buy that will give you strategies for doing those things. There are a thousand teachers who are doing those things. There are millions of kids doing those things.
Teaching can be a very easy profession when all you do is do what you are supposed to do.
I love to teach not because of what I am supposed to be doing. I love to teach because of the things I do that are not in the curriculum. I especially love to get kids to believe they are capable of doing more than they previously thought was possible. This year has been the toughest year for me in a long, long time. I have struggled so mightily to get them to once again believe in themselves, that they are powerful, that they are capable of doing more than they have previously been told. This conference gave me a wake-up call, it rejuvenated me.
My highlight might have been watching kids who had prepared for weeks by creating questions to interview teachers have someone walk up to the table who was not a teacher and without flinching proceeded on with the interview. If you happen to watch the interview, you’ll see one of the girls just close the laptop with the questions realizing they won’t be of much use. The guy who walked up and sat down happen to be best selling author Ken Davis. It’s not every day you get to sit across from someone like that.
This post isn’t really about my trip to the conference, it is a subtle reminder that our kids are capable of doing so much more. They will do more when you infect them with vigor…not rigor. They will do more when given a call to action, rather than given a worksheet. They will do more when they see that you are willing to go beyond what you are supposed to do. When you do that, so will they. They will be who you are, not just who you want them to be.
Our kids are all getting something out of our classes bigger than the content we teach, bigger than the skills and standards.
Each kid takes a little piece of us with them when they leave.
Please don’t just do what you are supposed to do…
We need kids who are not just ready for the future, but who are willing to create it.
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