Scattering Seed In Teaching BLOG

The new school year has begun(a new season), and like many other teachers, I have come out of a summer planning period of imagining where I would like to see my students in several months, if not in two to three years.  As I planned, I saw specific students in my mind.  I wondered how they were experiencing life the past months and where they will be emotionally and academically.  Looking to the end, or at some projected point out in the future, I worked through the content of my teaching to try and prepare the groundwork for the next year.  It required reflection on the previous year, understanding of the students who would be coming to my class and creativity.    None of this comes as a surprise.  In fact, teaching is only one of many professions that calls for this type of activity.  Business, medicine, law, psychology, etcetera call the professional to look back and look forward to preparing.    While preparing, though, a theme fr...

Each of us has a Story! This last week was the type of week that both energizes and saps energy, fortunately, they work together for balance. The week marked the middle of our grade period...and our classes for this term.  On the way to school, I quietly panned my classroom in my mind and tried to imagine what I knew about each student.  The deeper I dug, the more I realized that what I knew about some students was surface-level knowledge.  This disturbed me, because it represented a break in the community, the very thing that we all need.  Upon beginning my classes that day, I pointed out to my students that we had been working hard in class.  We had been learning a great deal about our subjects, which is why we are in school.  We are there for another reason, community, and to build community, we need to know each other.  We work alongside each other and build a team through that work, but how often do we stop to intentionally learn more ab...