I wrote recently about my love of teaching.
I shouldn’t have to explain this, but I will: I think that my love of my craft is good for students.
I don’t know if that’s true for every teacher. If you love teaching because you like bossing and bullying students, I suppose that’s not good for students. Or if you love teaching because it allows you to give busy work and play on your phone while students work on it – that’s not good for students either. Such teachers, I suppose, exist everywhere, just as there are less than stellar performers in every profession.
But I love teaching because literacy – reading, literature, writing, speaking and listening – are my passion, and I want to pass on that passion, and what I know about reading, literature, writing, and discussion to students.
Planning my year the way I do, I try to ensure that I am engaging students, building their skills, intertwining their reading with their writing, encouraging their voice and their responses to what we read. I design my year and my lessons not just to make them take tests better, but to make them better readers and writers, listeners and speakers, to make them enjoy being literate. And I want to help them to be more thoughtful human beings.
Seeing gaps in what my students can do inspires me to find new, non-standard ways to help them. That’s where my creativity benefits the students.
I choose the texts I choose to teach because of what they offer students: particular opportunities to practice reading skills; insights that might help them see the world and themselves differently; stories that will engage them and make them think; texts that tie together and help them make connections.
I let them write about what they care about because that is the best way to engage them with writing. It is also the best way to build their confidence as writers. Who ever got better at writing by writing about topics they care nothing about?
Everything I love about teaching I love because it helps students grow.
I’ve been told teachers shouldn’t just “teach their favorite things.” I think they should – because we chose our favorite things not merely because we like them, but because of what they do for students.
So the fact that I love teaching the way I do every day is good for my students.
Which makes me wonder – why are there so many forces at work right now trying make teachers hate their jobs?
I’ll get to that in my next post.