- I tell this story in this book.
This is like my bared soul story
that I wish I could pretend was about
someone else, 'cause I don't actually
like owning to it, but, listen,
free therapy, right?
Okay, so one of the things that ...
When I first started teaching,
I really got into teaching 'cause I was like,
"I want to change the world and make the world
a better place and I'm going to make that happen
in the classroom", and I'm like ...
You could see the stars shooting from my eyes of like,
"Ahh, this is going,
we're going to change the world
through projects, and all of this.
We're going to write letters to the President
and recycle", and then I got into the classroom,
and it was utter chaos.
I was trying to teach with good intentions and,
and it didn't go very well, I would say.
And the school I was teaching at,
it was very common for classrooms to use
color charts and clip charts,
and as my class basically cartwheeled between
the lunchroom and the classroom, and I
- Literally. - Tried ...
- Literally. And as I tried to teach
by just being louder and louder,
I started to feel like I must be doing it wrong
because everybody else's classroom
seemed so smooth.
So, for me, management was a huge barrier
between the classroom I wanted
and the classroom I had, and I didn't
have any skills, and so I started using the clip chart
that was being used in some of the other classrooms,
and very quickly my classroom dynamic changed.
It got calmer.
There was also an undertone, and I couldn't
really pin what it was until, one day,
I asked a kid to move his clip
and he just shredded the clip chart.
And there was this half a minute,
and then kids cheered.
I still get chills thinking about it
because I'm like, "Oh my gosh.
...
What am I doing to kids?"
I still remember that drive home,
just sort of processing that event
and thinking about how I thought
the classroom had gotten better,
but that was from my point of view,
and for a lot of kids, their days
had gotten a lot worse.
And I still, when I think about that,
it just stops me in my tracks to think that
choices that were made with good intention
Really
Good intentions aren't enough
to have successful classrooms for kids.
And I think that was my takeaway.
Which is, I just, it's never enough that it's
A. Working for me, and B. It can't be
that it's good intentions.
It has to be that it's actually
supporting the kids in the classroom.
And that was not, and since that day
I've made a lot of changes and I've
sort of rallied against the clip chart,
and we talk a lot about that in the book as well,
but, you know, I always wanted what's best
for kids in my room, but I didn't always stop
to think if what I was doing was the best for kids,
if at appearance sake it looked to be going well.
- Mm-hmm. Yeah, and we've shifted our thinking from
"What's best for kids in this space,
in this confined nine month, ten month period?"
to really thinking about our time with this child
as one little piece of a long continuum
of their entire life, and so,
it's not that it needs to be this wonderful
third grade year experience,
or first grade year experience,
but it needs to be that they feel valued
as citizens in our community,
that they feel like they have choice in what they're doing,
that they feel like school is a place of joy
and curiosity and wonder, and so every belief
that we have is rooted in this idea that
this is not about our one year,
it's about this child's life and we just
have the opportunity to be involved
in one little piece of their life.
And so, really, everything that we try to do
in our classroom is reflected in that core belief
that the kids just come first.
- And I think, just to add on to that,
that one of the things that I think
has shifted a lot is I used to want to be
my kids' favorite teacher.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, I want them to go to the next grade
and mourn me, and that was so much ...
How is that good for a kid to leave you?
It's like the ex you can't get over.
Is that a bad analogy to make about kids?
But it's like, you know, you want
You don't want it to be that the
experience exists within you, so that,
when they leave, it's gone.
That they, each year should be
better and better and better for them.
It shouldn't be about having this teacher
or that project, but it should be
what makes school powerful is how
I, as the student, feel in it,
not that the teacher did wacky hat day.
Not that you can't do that,
but that can't be what you're
pinning your hopes and dreams on.