Institute Pre-Work

I thought it might be cool to include one of my pre-institute writings on this blog. You can see the prompt for the final lesson and my response below:

Imagine that it is the end of your first year of teaching, and all of your students and their families write you a letter expressing their opinions, reflections, and feelings about the experiences they (or their children) have had with your class.

·       What do you hope your students and their families will say? Why?

·       What could they say that would tell you that you had been successful?

Helping students to love learning will be the most important theme of my classroom. Plutarch, a Greek philosopher, offered one of the most brilliant and well-known analogies about the mind. He said, “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited.” I want my student to be set ablaze with the power of words and numbers and stories and the potential of their own dreams. Education is not a perfect silver bullet, but it is a major ingredient in the most meaningful success stories. My students will face numerous obstacles, but I don’t want a poor education to be one of them.

Of course, igniting a love for learning is an end that requires many, many means. I want my students and their families to say that I cared deeply for the people inside my class, inside my school, and throughout the community. The best lesson I learned from a Kindergarten teacher that I worked with near Miami University is that you must always show you care. She explained that everything stems from that.

If my students’ minds are to be on fire with the knowledge they learned in my classroom, my mind must also be on fire! I want people around me to see me as a life-long learner. I recognize that my growth is a function of my desire to grow. My friends and professors from college could see my passion for knowledge acquisition. I want people to see that college was not the high point of my learning, but simply a ramp leading up the biggest and best jumps I will make with respect to my understanding of how the world works.

I want my students, their parents, my fellow teachers, and the school administration to see me as a humble, high performer. I want people to recognize my efforts, but they will find out that my hard work and toil are focused toward the most important part of the educational equation, student achievement. Connecting with students’ influencers will require my most sincere humility, but I know that these connections will be important to get help in order to reach my students’ big goals.

Finally, I hope my students honor our year together with more learning in their next school year and the year after that, and the year after that. High performance begets high performance. If I can help my students to know excellence in their learning and teach them how to replicate that excellence in a sustainable way, I have done my job very well. My students deserve the best teacher that I have inside of me. When the year is done I want them to believe I gave it too them.

In Houston!

I arrived in Houston on Thursday and have been enjoying my time so far. After landing in the George H. Bush International Airport, I joined up with about 6 other Houston Teach For America Corps members to board a SuperShuttle. The van dropped us off at the Crowne Plaza hotel where we registered for our three-day Induction.

Induction consisted of several workshops that helped us to familiarise ourselves with the organizational structure of the Houston Corps as well as a few outings to help us get to know one another. I continue to be inspired by the stories of past corps members including several Houston '07 teachers who shared their stories at our opening dinner. Everyone has been very kind.

Today we moved into Moody Towers at the University of Houston to begin the TFA Houston Institute. Since our region was already in Houston, we moved from the hotel to the university early this morning. Other groups will be arriving throughout the day.

Tomorrow will be my first day at Gallegos Elementary School where I will be teaching throughout the summer and next school year. I was hired to teach second grade, which I am very excited about. (I've heard from current corps members at Gallegos that my classroom isn't the best, but I'm sure that'll be a small challenge compared to those coming my way.)

I guess that's all for today. I hope I will be able to keep up this blogging better than I have thus far. I'm sure my students will provide a great deal of inspiration (and frustration) going forward. The trouble will be finding time to type it up!