First Day Advice From A Retired Teacher
As my friends get ready for a new school year and as I get ready for company and a party, I post here something that achieved a fair amount of Facebook traction in 2015, but with PICTURES! I think the words are worth repeating. Please forgive this shortcut (but it allows me to post a new blog entry when I really do not have time for one):
Some of the things I will be thinking about heading into this last year:
Remind both the young women and young men that if they only learn one thing in first grade, I will do my damnedest to make sure they learn to be kind. I would rather be around kind people than smart people. I am hoping for both, but if I have to choose, I choose kindness. It is not the kind of things we do or say that make us wise; wisdom comes from saying and doing kind things. There is NOTHING in my classroom more important than this.
Remember to NOT tell the young women in my class that they are beautiful (of course they are!). Focus instead on how much they know, how smart they are, and how much smarter they will come to be. Remember to show lots of examples of active, determined, smart women! Leave the cute, precious, adorable, gorgeous, beautiful comments to the family, where they belong. (And, OF COURSE, they are beautiful!)
Remind the young men that the part of their brains that controls manipulating pens and pencils is still growing. Challenge them to see whether they will be able to master these fine motor skills before the end of the year. Remind them that they are in control of liking or not liking what we do in school. Remember that no one has to like reading or school or math or anything AND THAT IS OKAY, but since we have to be in school, remember to ask them for suggestions about what I can do to make it easier. Remind them that they are beautiful, from time to time.
Remember to stress that if students discover that they are always getting things correct, that we have a problem. Remind them that they need to complain about always getting things right so that I can give them harder work. It is by struggling with problems that we get smarter, not by easily spewing out correct answers. Make the status symbol in the class be about trying hard things and not perfect papers.
Introduce students to our big, wide world! Remember that many students have never been outside of Allegan County much. I have had students that have never even seen lake Michigan. Our wide world includes the richness of geography AND culture. Remember that we fear what we do not know. It is very easy to unite people around fear, enemies, and hatred. First grade, however, is about doing what is hard and not what is easy.
Stress that we learn most efficiently when we want to test ourselves. All of our best learning will be because we decided that we wanted to be smarter. By definition, that means we do not wait for a teacher to teach something. We get on the horse ourselves and when we fall off, AND WE WILL FALL OFF, we get back on again and again and again!
It took more than one hundred thousand people to put a person on the moon. Remind students to look at each other, look around the school, look at the people in our neighborhoods, and see lots of teachers. We learn best when we work together.
Remember to love this class like it is your very last… (try not to cry too much)
