Archive
Join tonight’s #oklaed chat: Stereotypes in Schools
I’ve taken a little break from blogging (and from #oklaed chats) this summer. I’ll be tuning in tonight, however, as students from Del City High School take over the chat.
Nothing brings me more joy as a superintendent than watching our students lead. I’m constantly amazed at what Mid-Del students accomplish academically and through their extracurricular programs. Student leadership, though, is certainly one of our greatest strengths.
I found out via Twitter that they had volunteered to moderate tonight’s chat. I had nothing to do with the questions, and I won’t be over their shoulder as they lead and discuss. This is all their deal.
When we listen to students, we are at our best. I hope you will join tonight an let them lead us. This conversation is more important than pre-season professional football or Game of Thrones. Remember, you can record TV. It’s a thing.
See you at 8 tonight!
Two messages: one on testing, one on purpose
1. Yesterday, HB 3218 passed the House by a vote of 95-1:
Oklahoma students currently are required to pass four of seven tests in specific subject areas in order to graduate.
The bill would remove the requirement for the end-of-instruction tests, which would no longer be required for high school graduation.
The state Board of Education would be authorized to create new graduation requirements. The board, in cooperation with other entities, also would be asked to develop a statewide system of student assessment, which would be subject to approval from the Oklahoma Legislature.
The bill would make the 2016-17 school year a transition year and would require students to take the new assessment or assessments beginning in school year 2017-18.
If the Senate passes this bill and the governor signs it, we would have a slow transition away from End-of-Instruction exams, and the ACE graduation requirements would be a thing of the past. Graduation should not be linked to testing, and for that alone, I am grateful. With four days to go in the legislative session, I hope this bill keeps moving forward and becomes law.
As Rob Miller wrote last night:
With today’s action in Oklahoma, along with similar movements across our nation, I hope we are starting to recognize that education and success in life is more than doing well on a bubble test. And how a young child performs on any standardized assessment given on any one day of their life will NEVER be an accurate measure of their potential value to our world.
Human beings are not standardized and no set of standards, no curriculum, and no assessment will ever capture the true essence of what it means to be an educated person, or a person of efficacy.
The message HB 3218 sends is that our Legislature is beginning to understand this. They’re listening to educators, parents, and students more than ever before.
2. I’ll avoid discussing the budget today. By the end of the week there will be one. Of that I’m certain. Whether it will protect education, trample on the state’s poorest citizens, or resemble something Lewis Carroll would have written – that all remains to be seen.
Instead, I’ll stay positive. Below is a video from one of our middle school students to our teachers.
This is one of the videos we took of students at the end of the school year. After seeing her speak, I wanted to meet her, so I did. Sometimes it’s good to be the superintendent.
I don’t know how many thank you messages we recorded in all from our students to their teachers, but I know the whole video made the end of the year even more special.
Even if your year has already ended, think about the students we serve and what they mean to us. If you’re fortunate, they’ve shared their gratitude with you too.
Your life is not a gif
I’ve had a couple of days away from budgets and politics. In case you too need the respite, here is my commencement address to our three graduating classes of 2016:
Graduates, congratulations! Parents, congratulations! Teachers and principals, congratulations! Today we’re celebrating hundreds of individual accomplishments, but we’re also celebrating the collective contribution of each of you here. These students enter the world from high school – whether it be college, work, or anything else – on the heels of the caring adults who have taught them. They enter the world with the friendships They’ve developed during this time as well.
Students, you come here today with memories and hopes and dreams. You have goals and ambitions. You have certainty, and yet you face the unknown. I’ve talked with many of you. I know you have plans for the next four years, and then the 10 years after that. Well hold on for the ride. Some of what you have planned will unfold exactly as you expect it to. And then some won’t.
There’s no perfect blueprint for adulting – that’s a word I’ve learned from my own children who have entered post-high school life. Well, it’s not really a word, but a short time ago, many of the things we say now weren’t officially words either. When I was in high school, there was no Internet. One of my favorite words – blog – is only a little more than a decade old. The words photobomb and re-tweet were just added to the dictionary last year.
Another of my favorite words, though, is gif – G-I-F. You may think it’s a recent addition to the language but it actually dates all the way back to 1987, when I really was in high school. It’s an acronym that we use as a word. It stands for Graphics Interchange Format. Those of us who are on social media much at all think of gifs as short intervals of video that are cut to form a continuous loop. Basically, they’re the same five or ten seconds repeating again and again and again.
They’re funny. They’re sometimes effective tools for illustrating a point. And sometimes, they’re just obnoxious ways for cat owners to express themselves.
What they are not, however, is a blueprint for adulting. You don’t want to repeat the same 10 seconds of your life over and over, and you certainly don’t want to repeat someone else’s life over and over again. It’s your future out there. They’re your decisions to make – your triumphs, your mistakes, your struggles, your accomplishments.
When the good things you’re bound to experience happen, treasure them. Take pictures and videos. Tweet them to friends and family. Throw them out on Instagram and Snapchat. Add captions. Relive them through the magic of Timehop, or whatever comes next in the way of social media. Getting caught up in a moment is a great thing sometimes. Just don’t be stuck in an endless, repeating loop.
As you exit high school, you have a certain number of choices before you. What you’ve done to this point has helped determine whether that’s a high number or low number. As you get older, you’ll still have choices to make. You can choose a career path now, and you can change your mind in a couple of years. It’s easier to do that at 20 or 22 than it is at 33 or 44 or 55. The older you get, more people will be impacted by the choices you make.
I can just think of two critical things you don’t want, though. One is to let other people determine who you should be. As hard as it is for your family to hear sometimes, you are the person who has to figure that out. Nobody else gets to choose where you live, how you make money, or even what you want to name your children. If you’re fortunate, you’ll have an endless stream of unsolicited advice. Sometimes it will even feel like pressure. Just remember, though, sometimes the best path is the one nobody saw coming.
The other thing is not to let your life unfold so that you look back on high school and say, Those really WERE the best years of my life. Don’t peak at 18 or 19. Even if you loved every minute of high school – and I know you did – make the next four years even better. Then, make the next four years even better than that. You can always climb higher than where you are right now.
And when you hit a rough patch along the way – whether it’s because you made certain choices, or it’s because sometimes, bad luck just lands on us – figure out what went wrong and change your path. Don’t spend another year, or four years, or 10 or 20 years, beating yourself up, wondering what went wrong.
Your life is not a gif. As much as you don’t want to keep a highlight reel on in the background at all times, recycling the same moments again and again, you definitely don’t want to relive the unfortunate times more than you have to.
It’s a great world out there. It’s huge. It’s great to be a (Bomber/Eagle/Titan), but you can be even more than that. Some of you are going to be Raiders, or Sooners, or Cowboys, or Bronchos, or any number of other things. You’re going to become mothers and fathers, and someday, in the very distant future, even grandparents. You’re going to go to work, and some of you will even become somebody’s boss.
And when you do all of this, when you’re smack-dab in the middle of adulting, I hope you’ll look back at your time in high school – really, at all ages of schooling – as something better than a gif. I hope you’ll see it as a gift – that’s with a T on the end. Wherever you go in the world, I hope you’ll see the value in educating our youth, and building this country’s future.
Leave home. Come back and visit. Email your principals, counselors, and teachers and let them know how you’re doing. Call your parents often. Never forget your roots. They’re what give you the strength to pick the path that’s ahead of you – the path you choose, whether it’s the one less-traveled, or the one with all the tread.
Congratulations, and good luck, Class of ’16!
Two Things: Remember the One Thing
Quickly this morning, I want to tell you what I told my Leadership Team this week. I know we’re crazy busy. We’re stressed over budgets. Ending the year and planning the next one amid uncertainty is driving us mad.
For my district, though, this is our last week with this group of kids. Find moments to put the stress aside. Enjoy the senior breakfasts, awards dinners, super kids days, and graduations. That’s why we do what we do. That’s why we stress in the first place.
Instead of a song or a meme today, I’ll just give you two quotes:
- After all, life hasn’t much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others. – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place. – Zora Neale Hurston
One week: remember the one thing that matters.
And fine, here’s one song:
You are not a Test
I have many reasons to be proud to be part of the Mid-Del Public Schools family. We have amazing students and families. We have dedicated teachers and principals. We have a supportive community that includes Tinker Air Force Base and Rose State College. Most of all, we have our priorities in order.
You may have already seen this on Facebook, but in case you haven’t, here’s a letter that a parent of a Ridgecrest Roadrunner posted last night.
We all get hung up on our accomplishments, and to an extent, that’s ok. We should be proud when we do well. When a school raises test scores, I have no problem with the celebrations that follow. As little stock as I place in the A-F report cards, if I were a principal, and my school received an A, I’d hang up a big old banner too.
Still, the second paragraph of this letter to students captures what the best educators among us know to be true:
[The tests] do not know that some of you speak two languages, or that you love to sing or draw. They have not seen your natural talent for dancing. They do not know that your friends count on you to be there for them, that your laughter can brighten the darkest day or that your smile lightens a room….
What I know about the teachers and principal at this school is that they do care about student achievement. They care about getting their students ready for not just the state test, but also for the next grade or the next school. I know that they have a veteran staff and that they rally around students and families in need.
Because tests have high-stakes attached to them, we must take them seriously. One thing we know to be part of our job is to protect children from harm. Artificial consequences attached to assessments that are poor descriptors of learning and ability and worse descriptors of future success fall into this category. We should not gear instruction solely around them, nor should we act as if they don’t exist.
We also should not, as Rob Miller writes, ignore the fact that some most of our students have other priorities.
The folks making six-figure salaries for testing vendors like Pearson, ETS, CTB/McGraw-Hill, and Measured Progress believe that children OWE them their loyalty by giving their best effort to this annual exercise: “By God, we’ve worked hard to craft these beautiful measures of student learning, the very least you could do is show your appreciation by doing your best.”
This presumption is so strong in their mind that because this is such self-evidently important work, that they cannot imagine anybody not seeing its value.
These folks live in a magical land where every child is loved, comes to school eager to learn, and loves to sit quietly for hours taking multiple choice tests on a laptop, while unicorns frolic with elves in rainbow-laden fields.
Children are smarter than this. They understand the reality that these tests are simply a means to sort, rank, humiliate and punish kids through various forms of public shaming, things like grade retention, denial of a high school diploma, and forced placement in “remediation” classes.
The testing companies say kids should love these swell assessments because they were crafted with their best interests in mind.
Of course, parents and students have to be made to believe this because otherwise, what’s the purpose of it all?
If a student is bored or tired or hungry or distracted or scared or neglected or angry or sad or just doesn’t care or doesn’t see any point or just feels like playing video games or listening to loud music or playing basketball or singing songs or painting a picture or checking out the hot girl two rows over or thinks that high-stakes testing is stupid or prefers to write open-ended answers in the form of rap lyrics or long rambling run-on sentences like this . . . if that happens, every single piece of precious data derived from these test results, ranging from A-F report cards, to teacher VAM evaluations, to student growth calculations, to all of it is craptacular crap.
It could just be that our students love to sing and dance or run and play more than they want to test. It could be that they love to read more than they want to suffer through the reading passages selected for them on the tests. Whatever the variable, we just have to understand that when the test scores come back, they may or may not tell us anything useful.
And for that, we pay millions.
Try hard, kids. Do your best. Then go outside and play.
Haiku You Doin?
I really haven’t had a lot of time to write this week. I attended a conference in Tulsa. We’re budgeting for a massive shortfall next year. And, well, my personal life gets in the way sometime.
Still, some crazy things have happened in the last few days. To acknowledge them, I’m simply going to address each with a single haiku.
House Committee Passes Voucher Bill
Two votes short, no prob –
Bring in Denney and Hickman.
Just so convenient!
Thank the Eight who Voted No
You made the right choice.
No accountability?
Vouchers are a sham.
Blue Cereal Education: End #oklaed
Why fight anymore,
Especially this rigged game?
Like Elsa, let it go.
Rob Miller Opts in to Testing?
Tongue firmly in cheek,
Rob finally wants to test!
It was just a joke.
Senate Education Committee will not hear Consolidation Bills
Senator Ford listens;
His constituents are clear.
Even his bill dies.
A Church Speaks out against Vouchers
Clear and forward thought:
Vouchers threaten liberty.
Thankful they get it.
So we didn’t lose $43 million?
What a huge SNAFU!
Forgot to update spreadsheet!
Inconceivable!
Oklahoma Education Coalition Releases Verified Figures
Enough false narrative!
Trying to distract, divide?
This page gives the facts.
Apparently, Rob, Dallas, and I are still Offending People.
Middle Ground News whines.
Do I intimidate you?
Seriously, dude.
He just doesn’t care
What Jay Chilton thinks of him.
We keep striking nerves.
That’s all for tonight. Have a great week, #oklaed!
2015 Year in Review (Part III)
In Part I of my year-end review, I covered some of the changes from January to June of this year. We were all warm and fuzzy because we had a new state superintendent and she liked us and listened to us and invited us to hang out at her office and all that good stuff. More than that, she was in the same fights we were, but – and this was the real departure from the previous four years – she was on our side. We didn’t win all of the fights, but some that seemed to go away on their own actually disappeared because of political finesse. That’s still a win in my book.
Part II had less focus. I blame me changing jobs and having less time to write. Still, in the last month or so, I seem to have found a groove. Over the last six months, we have gone everywhere from the collective apathy around the state over A-F Report Cards to the return of voucher propaganda around the state. We also learned, sadly, that we’re broker than broke. We’re MC Hammer broke. We’re not Greece, but we’re not exactly Monaco either. And it’s not that people in this state aren’t making money either. Let’s just say that if somehow, all of Oklahoma had been responsible for all of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and its billionty dollar opening weekend, our state leaders would have found a way to keep from generating any state revenue from it.
Now, to the top five posts for the year:
- I am okeducationtruths – For all the people who supported the blog when I was writing anonymously, I had no idea that the number of readers and followers would grow so much once I removed the mask.
I couldn’t have done what I did for the first 29 months of the blog without support from so many friends and colleagues who didn’t even know they were contributing. As more blogs have emerged during the last few years, we’ve collectively built something really special here. Our blogging presence, the success of our EdCamps, and our Sunday night #oklaed chats are gaining national recognition. While our writing has a pretty limited focus, mostly to pushing back against bad education policy in this state, our story parallels so many others. We are both a cautionary tale and a success story.
- Save AP – I didn’t write much on this post. Mainly, I included a few lines of discussion from legislators who were questioning whether or not it was ok to have Advanced Placement classes in Oklahoma at all since they resembled Common Core, with the critical thinking and all. The main issue was the scheduled course redesign of AP US History, which Southmoore High School Teacher David Burton covered thoroughly. More specifically, a few legislators were afraid that we were teaching students bad things about the country.
Here is a page from a presentation made by College Board Vice President Trevor Packer at a conference I attended in February.
Of the five points shown on this particular page discussing World War II, four are clear statements about the strengths of our nation. Only one – mention of the internment of Japanese Americans – is negative. And I don’t see anything wrong with including that. The framework leaves it to the teacher’s discretion which battles, treaties, events, and individuals to emphasize during the course. Most of it will be positive. We studied Japanese internment camps when I was in school, and we were deeply disturbed by it – most of us to the point that we’d never want to see that happen again.
There was nothing to see here. Sometimes, I guess birds just flap their wings to hear the sound of the wind.
There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
- 182 Emergencies and Counting! – Well, now we’re up to 977 for the current school year.
As I’ve said previously, some teachers start with emergency certification and become great educators. Unfortunately, many – lacking teacher preparation courses and hours logged as student teachers under veteran teachers – succumb to how difficult the job is and last a short period of time. Some leave within days, and then we’re back where we started.
- Shortage of Teachers, Shortage of Pay – This was my first post of the year, and it was even more popular in March than it was in January. In fact, this post has had a decent number of page views during each month of the year. This is the conversation we can’t quit having. There’s a teacher shortage. Teachers haven’t had an increase in pay in years. There’s no change in sight to this cycle.
(from Washington Post)
Keep in mind, as you look at the chart, that this includes all compensation – salary, insurance, and retirement. This does not include administrator salaries in the averages. Every time I use the chart, I get comments along the line of I’ve taught for 20 years and I still don’t make $44,000. And you are correct. But if you add the benefits together, this is the cost to your district of employing you. Or something like that.
We also know that with a $1,000 raise, Oklahoma teachers would still be in 49th place. With a $5,000 raise, Oklahoma teachers would move up to 36th place. At least we would if everyone else were standing still.
Sigh. We’re the ones still standing still.
At least we still have Mississippi and South Dakota below us.
- Guest Post on the Teacher Shortage from a POed Parent – It’s no coincidence that the three most popular posts on okeducationtruths from this year have to do with the teacher shortage. At this point, we’re all frustrated about where we are now and worried about the future. By we, I mean educators, parents, and even legislators. That’s right, the majority of our elected officials are worried about this too.
Dan Vincent, the post’s author, was very clear about why – other than just money – people aren’t flocking to the profession:
Over the past several years I have also observed waves of educational reforms crashing into the doors of classrooms and onto the desks of students—reforms initiated and passed into law by our state legislature. If you are a student or teacher, you’ve felt it; my kids have felt it. The changes included things like the A-F, the RSA, the ACE and the TLE to name a few. These have been widely recognized by educational leaders in our state as doing more harm than good, especially when it comes to teacher morale and student engagement. Professional associations, parent groups, blogs and personal anecdotes have documented how these reforms are negatively impacting Oklahoma districts, classrooms and kids. There has also been much written about how these reforms are DRIVING GOOD TEACHERS OUT OF THE CLASSROOM. Legislators have been told this over and over. Personally, I have had civil discussions about the issues I see; I have written umpteen letters to lawmakers pleading for change. I have friends who written many more.
I always say that the teacher shortage comes down to two things: money and respect. Some legislators really do understand that teacher pay is too low. Unfortunately, several of those think that there are solutions other than the state coughing up more money to put into the formula. Combined with the group that just doesn’t get the magnitude of the problem at all, we’re just not getting anywhere.
Roll all of that together with an alphabet soup of reforms that have been copied after Florida and thrown at schools, and it just keeps getting harder to keep good people around.
Maybe now that more parents are catching on, legislators will listen more too. If not, let’s get some new ones.
So those were my five most popular posts of the year. What follows are five more – they weren’t as popular, but they meant a lot to me. Mostly, they remind me why, in spite of the issues we face, I’m glad I chose this career.
Blogger Challenge: The Things We Pretend
Throughout the spring and summer, many Oklahoma bloggers responded to various blogger challenges. I love these, mainly because it’s like an extended thought version of one of our Sunday night chats. In many cases, it helps me see that there’s some substance beyond the 140 character universe to which we often limit ourselves.
This challenge stemmed from Iowa’s Scott McLeod, who writes at Dangerously ! Irrelevant. If you click to his link, you’ll see ideas from across the country. This is a question we need to ask ourselves frequently.
Blogger Challenge & The Heartbreakers
This was a response to another blogger challenge.
When I was in the classroom, my favorite thing to do was to challenge people to like things that wouldn’t ordinarily appeal to them. This was true with poetry. Teaching sophomore English, I could have just jumped in with Wordsworth or Teasdale or some other ancient that English majors love. No, I started with Free Fallin’. Because I could.
Maybe it’s because she’s a middle child. Maybe it’s because Austin is a fun place. Maybe it’s because she could. In any case, my daughter left her comfort zone in August and started college at the University of Texas. Yes, even though her mother and I have four degrees between us from the University of Oklahoma, she headed south. So far, it’s been a good choice for her. And we have more reason to go to Austin and eat at my favorite breakfast place (it’s really more of a lean-to than a structure, per se).
Why Teach Here? Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose
This was the second part of my response to the blogger challenge, Why Teach? Given the teacher shortage, I think the second question, why teach here? is equally important. I want teachers to want to be where I am.
Using Daniel Pink’s book Drive, and a ten minute video that gives a pretty good explanation of motivation, I distilled my goals for the people around me into these three words.
If teachers, principals, and even crazy central office people had more of this, they’d have a lot more satisfaction.
So would our students – and this is the kind of district I want Mid-Del to be.
I stressed pretty hard over this one. As a first-year superintendent, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say to 180 people I’d never met before and who were really curious about what they were getting into. What I do when I’m uncomfortable is blog, so I treated the moment as I do so many of the other significant milestones in my life now.
If you’ve heard me speak, you know there’s a pretty big gap between what I intend to say and what actually comes out of my mouth. I’m more comfortable walking to the front of a stage or moving throughout a room winging it than I am standing behind a lectern. I want people to know where my passions lie.
So if what I wrote here was any good, I can’t say that it’s what I delivered the next morning. We’ll call it close.
Oh, and since it’s Christmas Eve, here’s some Annie Lennox and Al Green:
Welcome to New Teachers
Tomorrow, I get to welcome new teachers to Mid-Del Public Schools. I’ve been involved in new teacher training for the last seven years while I was in Moore, but this is my first run at it as a superintendent. I feel I have more to say than I have time for, and I’m not well-known for sticking to a script once I get going – especially when coffee and donuts are in my line of sight. For those of you who made tomorrow’s schedule, I apologize in advance.
With that in mind, here’s what I would like to say, again, if the script mattered.
—–
Welcome to Mid-Del Public Schools! For the next 9 months, and hopefully longer, you will be responsible for educating the 14,500 students in this school district. First of all, we want to thank you for accepting that responsibility. These are children who need you, who need a good education, who need to know that what we do everyday has relevance to their lives.
We have school for one purpose – to teach children. Parents send their kids to us for one reason – so they can learn.
Before that, though, we have to promise those parents one critical thing – that we can keep their children safe. We have to be on our toes because with this many children and thousands of adults around, we have a lot of moving parts. We all know what it means to treat each other with respect and with dignity. Most of the people who work for us know it too. I’d even go so far as saying that most of our children know it too. It’s an inherent quality – maybe it’s the golden rule. Whether we’ve formally been taught this or not, we know from an early age that we want to feel safe and that other people do too. That’s why you see children run to hug other crying children that they don’t even know.
Most of us understand this, but unfortunately, there are no absolutes when it comes to human behavior. There will be students, teachers, even parents who cross these lines. Some may not even realize they’re doing it, and what we’re left with are students who hate school from an early age.
Think about a four year old you’ve known in your life. If you’re a parent who’s driven your children across the country, did they try to count to 100 or to whatever high number they could reach? Did they sing? If you stopped at a national monument or a historical marker, did they listen intently as you read it to them? A four year old who can’t read, but who has been exposed to parents who not only can, but do, will pick up a book and make up a story. A four year old will play in the dirt, swing from a tree limb, dance, and color on the walls. They’ll even watch TV and learn a foreign language if you show it to them.
When you think about it, there isn’t a single academic content area that a four year old WON’T participate in. So why does that change? Do we do something to change it?
First of all, not all of the children we get are anything like the four year olds we were or the ones that we have raised. Some children come to us hungry and scared. And some just come and go, come and go. Our job then, is to teach them as well as we can for as long as we have them, and to remember that we might be the best experience they ever have in school.
Sometimes, the difference we make is obvious. We see students succeed academically. They win awards. They get scholarships. They come back from college and slap us on the back and tell us they never would have made it without us. Sometimes, though, we don’t see it at all.
I’ve carried a note around with me from job to job for the last 17 years. It was written by a freshman who was having a bad day. Apparently, I said something to help. She wrote:
Mr. Cobb,
I just want to thank you for your concern. Not many people would take the time to ask how someone was doing. My friends don’t even seem to care sometimes. Thank you again. It means a lot to me.
At the time I received the note, I didn’t remember what I had said to her. Years and jobs later, I really don’t recall. I messaged that student on Facebook a few weeks ago and showed her a picture I took of the note. She remembered it even better than I did.
Maybe another story illustrates our importance even better. One time when I was a principal, the chief of police was waiting for me in my office at 7:00 am on a Monday. We had a student – a ninth grader – whose parents had been in a fight the night before. It took all night to get the dad out of the house and get him to jail. Our student, who was often in trouble and really didn’t care about school, also had his own temper. Little things would set it off. This was no little thing.
I addressed my staff that morning at our scheduled faculty meeting and gave them the details I could. Since this was a small school and everybody knew everybody, there wasn’t a teacher who didn’t need to know that the student would be even more on edge that day. Towards the end of the meeting, I asked them to show some understanding, and if he needed to excuse himself from class because he was about to explode, that they needed to let him come see me voluntarily. One teacher stood up and said, “But Mr. Cobb, rules are rules!” Without thinking, I responded, “Yeah, but we have to love the kids more than we love the rules.” I think for most of my teachers, that was my defining moment as principal.
Rules are important. We can’t have chaos in our classrooms, our halls, our lunchrooms, our playgrounds, or on our buses. We also have to know when to bend. You have to love the kids more than you love the rules. You have to love the kids more than you love lots of things: the rules, your test scores, your won-loss record, your quiet little piece of the master schedule.
First, you love the kids. Then you keep them safe. Then you teach them.
So before we get to the first thing, we have two other things. Yes, school is about teaching and learning. Yes, it’s ok if you love physics or Spanish or English or programming or music. You should be passionate about what you teach. You should just be more passionate about who you teach.
How many times have we heard about the impact of music on math and literacy scores? While this is undeniable, what we forget is the impact of music, and art, and drama, and reading, and just all around curiosity, on the soul. All of these things matter in their own right, not just for some outcome tied to high-stakes testing.
Four year olds get this. We should too.
Let me close with a few words that I wrote last year at this time.
Work hard and contribute something. Be the first teacher that some student has ever liked. Don’t try to measure everything. Take pictures of the first group of students you teach and look at them from time to time. Make friends at work and defend your profession fiercely. Treasure your mentors. Cherish what you do. Most importantly, if you ever get to the point that you don’t love working for the children every day, leave. And if that’s the path you choose, leave on the highest note possible.
Those comments were written specifically for first year teachers, but I think they apply to all of us. I could tell you who my mentors have been, and rest assured, I treasure them. I also still have the picture of the first group of kids I taught in Muskogee in 1993.
For all the evidence my students have given me through the years that I’ve made an impact in their lives, I have more proof, tangible and personal, that they have made mine better. I used to say that your career doesn’t define who you are. I quit saying that a few years ago. This is who I am. I’m an educator. I’ve done this for half my life now. There’s no denying it. I’m proud of it, and I hope you will be too. I hope you’ll tell the world, too, after this year, two very important things:
- This is a great profession.
- This is a great place to work.
Have a great year!
okeducationtruths 