Values
As an educator, I believe in...
Fun
"If you're not laughing, you're not learning."
School needs to be fun. As I learned from 6 years in continuation school, if the class is not fun, the students will not come to school. Fun is not just for electives; this is true for core classes as well, as I learned from teaching science and math.
Nowhere is fun more essential than in the foreign language classroom. As an avid language learner, and teacher of both ESL and Spanish, I discovered that if it’s not fun, they won’t play. If they won’t play, they won’t practice, won’t learn. Especially at the beginning levels of language learning, all attempts to produce responses are potentially embarrassing. You know your accent is awful, the grammar is probably wrong, and the amount of time it takes for basic word retrieval is taxing on even the most angelic native listener. It’s humiliating. In the face of such harsh emotional realities, people either get angry or laugh. To stay engaged, open and learning, they must laugh. What lengths will we go to get our students to laugh? Almost nothing is too ridiculous. We understand that ridiculousness is part of the process, and the process is fun.
Learners need to see the value in what they are doing. It is so much more motivating to complete a project that goes somewhere, does something, plays a real role in the world. Even as early as my student teaching year, I recall being frustrated that so much of schoolwork consisted of producing what I called 'stupid paper.' Even the culminating projects, like papers or posters, ultimately were useless artifacts that collected dust and were eventually thrown away. I believed, and still believe, that young people (even as young as 11 or 12) are capable of producing useful things.
Learners need to see the value in what they are doing. What they make needs to GO somewhere, DO something, either for themselves personally or for someone else. The more specific the audience, the more meaningful and authentically useful the final product can be. If education was about making useful things, the gap between classroom and career wouldn’t seem so extreme.
Relevance
Classroom Management through Curriculum
Hard work
"He who says it can’t be done should not interrupt the one who is doing it."
There are times to burn the midnight oil. There are times to teach kids to work hard, to give it their best. Your growing edge is the place where what you can do meets what you can’t, and the purpose of education is to push that line. How can this be better? How can I be better? How can this make a difference? Where does this matter? What next?
I believe that people have a tendency to live up to your expectations of them, and as a result, high expectations are the only way to success. Rather than lowering the bar because it is hard, we the educators need to find ways to support and engage students to achieve real things.
When I was hired to my first job, the assets of our school consisted of 1 other teacher, a director and a box of post its. We built this school from the ground up. Many things we didn’t know ‘couldn’t be done’ so we went out and did them. It was a powerful experience of adventure and innovation. While our students eventually went on to earn their high school diplomas, I think we the teachers learned even more. It was an incredible learning experience for me, as I discovered what it took to run a school, designing everything from the bell schedule to the credit recovery and independent study programs. What a challenge! And what a reward.
Encouragement
People will live up to your expectations. Believe the best.
Kindness
"Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind."
