I have not blogged since March of 2011. Almost 4 years have passed. I know that I have been greatly missed by my 4 followers - relax friends I am back. I find myself with some time on my hands as I am nursing a knee injury - ALSO a friend of mine has recently entered the blogging world. These two unrelated happenings have served as inspiration to start writing again. I am the type of person that cannot be still. So I guess if I cannot run around the house cleaning, doing laundry, running errands etc ...... I have to do some mental running around. So here I go into the deep dark corners of my aging brain. Beyond this point there be dragons........
I am going to write about education and teaching as it consumes a giant portion of my every waking moment. Specifically - I am going to write about motivation and forming a connection with students. I am the kind of teacher that gets pretty attached to my students. I remember crying on the last day of school of my first year. The other teachers looked at me with polite, knowing smiles and said "you won't feel this way next year." The thing is .... I did. And I have felt that way every year since. I have moved past the crying......well to some degree. But I still feel a huge gigantic sense of loss when the last day of school arrives. I believe a big part of this is that because I teach grade 8 - my students will not be coming back next year. They will be moving on to the big leagues. I always feel so excited for them and so proud. But I also feel a little tug at my heart strings. I want to stay connected. I want to be there for them. I want to find out how they are doing. This has not changed in 12 years of teaching.
I guess what I want to address in this entry is BALANCE. I need more of it. With me - if I am in - I am ALL in. I don't generally just "like" something. That translates to my teaching as passion but not just for what I teach but for who I teach. I am deeply interested in and passionate about the 14 year old kids that sit in front of me every day.
How I believe that aids me in motivating them is that they know that I care about them. They know that I will fight for them. They also know that I care about them more as people than as students. I guess this is what leads to the attachment piece. If I had a dollar for every time my caring colleagues look at me and say "cut the apron strings....!" I am also part of a team that is a pretty even division of male and female teachers. So it helps me to back off sometimes. But my question remains.....how do I teach myself when to back off? How do I accept that sometimes, there is nothing that I can do - or that I am not the one who should be doing it? I might as well be looking for a ghost orchid.
I think that some of this stems from the fact that in early March of my second year of teaching, one of my grade 8 boys - a sweet, sensitive young man took his own life one evening about an hour after arriving home from school. Telling his classmates on that cold morning following his death - flanked on either side by my amazing administrator and unbelievably strong child and youth counselor was something that I will never forget. I remember at his visitation his grandmother clutched my arm for most of the time asking me questions about him.....about what he was like in the classroom, what were things like on his last day of school - just like the rest of us she was trying to make sense of it. On that day I promised myself that I would never again miss a sign. I would be vigilant and unrelenting. I would advocate even when everyone around me was telling me to stand down. I promised him that I would trust my instincts and even if they were wrong I would be the one who sounded the alarm in error - I could take that.
When I am in the classroom each day I think about my students and how their day is going. When I am trying to motivate I just do what comes natural. I think a large part of motivation comes organically from a teacher's own excitement about the topic. And I am bursting with excitement for the subjects I teach (ok.....with the possible exception of Geography). In my profession we hear this phrase often "I don't teach curriculum, I teach kids." It is a kind of saccharine phrase - but I really do feel this. And admittedly sometimes I feel like the curriculum is an albatross around my neck. But luckily in my subject areas (English, Art, Drama, and History/Geography) I can deliver the curriculum without selling my soul. Motivation is not an external thing. I don't believe that there is any book or any educational journal that can provide a magic bullet for motivating students. It comes from inside. Kids can tell when you are putting in time. They can tell when you are trying to jam curriculum down their throat. They can certainly tell if you care about the subject you teach. And most of all they can tell in a heartbeat if you care about THEM. My students can tell when I am cranky and short tempered. I take that as encouragement because it tells me that this is not the norm. They can see through my thinly veiled distaste for any form of standardized test. Just like I read them - they read me. So ....... the balance issue. How do I back off? How do I decide what is important and what I can let go of? My husband often says this to me - "put down the boxing gloves." What he means is - sometimes you have to stop fighting. I am not sure how I feel about this.
So while I will continue to seek greater balance - I will hopefully be able to do it without compromising my commitment to my kids. In summary.....I believe that motivation is all about connection. It is about getting to know your students and teaching them by showing them that you care about their world and what they are interested in. It is also achieved through showing parts of your world to them and discovering parts of the world WITH them.
In fact learning together - teacher and student - is probably the greatest motivator of all.
