Blue-Sky Teaching

When I read Kristen Hannah's The Nightingale , I woke up in the middle of the night, heart pounding, freezing cold, released from a dream that I was living in a French village where the Nazis were doing horrible things.  More than once.  Never mind that I am not French; I've never been to a small village in France; and I am not even close to being old enough to have experienced World War II. I lived that book so deeply, it invaded my brain during the night and snuck into my waking hours in little realizations - I have heat. I have a grocery store a little over a mile away.  No one sleeps in my house without permission. When we connect with a book we love, we are changed.  We learn a lot - in my case, I learned about France during World War II - we get to know people and experiences in new ways.  We have conversations - on Facebook, with others who had read The Nightingale , and in my classroom as I shared snippets with my students. But here's the deal:  I chose to rea

Let's get real, teachers.  It's not popular (maybe it's even shocking) to say you have a class you do not like.  The honest truth is that this happens on a regular basis.  If you don't believe me, hang out in the teacher's lounge more often.  For me, as I look back through my years of teaching, I notice a pattern.  These classes take place at the end of the day.  The kids are not focused at all.  I'll restate that. They still do not notice the opening assignment on the Smart Board.  Nor do they get their materials out and ready.  The kids shout across the room to each other.  They never have a pencil or a pen. They complain about everything I ask them to do.  Some kids fall asleep (I have NO idea how.) And, darn it, they wear me out.   Even as I write this paragraph, teacher guilt creeps in. They're just kids, Lynn. They're not all bad. It's just a few. And the excuses go on and on.  In our profession, there is this underlying assumption that we

I woke up this morning more awake than I've felt in a while.  As I got out of bed, thoughts of the past several months swirling in my head, one stood out,  I really love my job .  This hit me with a jolt of a surprise today. It's February, not exactly the brightest time of the year for anyone.  Most of my students have been with me in our grumpy, winter slump - we're tired, and all this thinking and reading and writing and having to participate is just not feeling very good.  I can also get really dragged down by a lot of other things:  I teach more students who live in poverty than I ever have; my state ranks 43rd in teacher pay; and our current political climate is night-marish for teachers right now. And still, I woke up feeling great about what I do.  I am proud to be a teacher.  I can still remember days as a child setting up my school room in our basement.  I had a chalk board and some TV tables as desks, and that's all I needed.  I'd play for hours, r