A note to my younger professional self…….

Tim Huls
Tim Huls
Jul 21, 2017 · 2 min read

Hey Tim, relax. Those 4th grade Nebraska Standards that you are expected to drill into your student’s minds will not define you as a teacher, and most importantly, the information gained or missed by your students will not define them either. Volunteer to take recess duty everyday and use every minute of that time to play with the students. Yes, those lesson plans and rubrics can wait.

Create relevant experiences first, then have your students reflect and describe those experiences to generate their own content to define Boyle’s Law, Charles Law and Bernoulli’s Principle. Nice Job of not asking your students to memorize the periodic table, but why in the hell did you spend so much time working on balancing chemical equations? Move on. Those that understand it are the ones that might use it in the future, and those that don’t get it have already figured out that this is something that they will never use in their adult lives. A brick and a feather will fall at the same rate when placed in a vacuum (which is an eye opener for most freshmen to see), but stop wasting time on the importance of 9.8 m/s/s. Spend more time using the internet to make connections to those that use Science on a daily basis rather than trying to find time sucking irrelevant activities. Nice job avoiding the teacher’s lounge and eating in the lunchroom with the students, but volunteer to take lunch duty everyday allowing you more time to build positive relationships with kids. Yes, those lesson plans and rubrics can wait.

Not sure why you chose to get into administration, but keep grinding away. Don’t lose sight of the reason why you chose this profession. Decent job of getting into the classrooms, but you need to do more of it. You are not going to please everyone. If you want to leave a legacy, then continue to focus on character education. You know what is right. Trust it. Do it.

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Tim Huls

Written by

Tim Huls

Husband. Dad. Trying to make a difference while keeping things in perspective. Life is good. Growing up on the farm made it better.

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