The Way to Respect

There is no winnowing fork so thorough than a class full of young students. At the same time, there is no ground more fertile than their minds, which often appear to reject knowledge and balk at order and respect but actually desire both as dry lands crave water. They are a people that will unknowingly test every principle you have, push against every act of patience you demonstrate, and bore not one but many holes into the center of your heart. Why? The reason is universal: they desire to be found acceptable and loved as they are. 

The true triumph as an educator is not that they remember every grammatical term or mathematical equation, or even that they can apply such basic components to their lives, but that they know love from you as their teacher. This is the key that gains entry into a person's will and earns genuine respect. It makes the rest of teaching easy (even if your lessons are not the most well thought out or stimulating and you are not the most organized or forward thinking person). Perfect love casts out the fear of judgment and will suffer much. It will also reproduce itself and all its related virtues.

Desks of a Feather

It isn't really a wonder that the desks in my classroom shift every class. But how much they move over six class periods is astonishing. I mean, I've had an entire row shift by over a foot. It makes me think of birds and how social they are, how they flock together on telephone lines and in trees. Truly, students in my classroom aren't too unlike birds - their desks become an extension of their active bodies, and students are just "flocking" together, trying to be closer and bend around all the rules and requirements of a traditional classroom. And at the end of the day, I get to reset the desks and wait to see how far they move the next day.