The Night Before
For the first time in three years, I’m sitting in my own classroom with endless thoughts running through my head as I think about my students walking through the door for the first day of school tomorrow. I feel like a new teacher again. Not only have I been out of the classroom for three years, but I have barely even been inside a school in the past year. To say I’m feeling a little anxious would be an understanding.
So, since few things calm my mind like writing, here we are.
Earlier today I found myself wandering around my classroom aimlessly as I ate a sandwich, and everything running through my head felt negative. I was identifying any possible way the opening week activities could go wrong, feeling concerned about my rusty classroom management strategies and the chaos that could cause, and thinking about how much I feel unsure of this year. I was doubting myself and how things were going to go. It was trapped in the weeds, the details.
And then out of nowhere, I got teary.
Not bad teary.
Good teary.
For some reason a student vividly came into mind for me from years ago as I wandered my room. This student is always associated with positive memories for me. He grew so much the year that I had him, and I still have a tie he gave me with the letter that I keep in my desk where he thanked me for simply being there for him, for not giving up on him when he showed up to my class barely able to put a sentence together in English.
Just like that, things shifted.
I know I’m going to make mistakes. I know I’m going to struggle. I know there will be days where I’m not the teacher I wish I could be all the time.
Yet, this student was my reminder that those things aren’t what really matter. If I truly want to show my students that their mistakes and failures don’t define them, I have to extend that grace to myself as well.
What matters is how students feel when they come into my room and the effort I put into helping them see their own potential.
To help me be more centered and focused as I start the year, I’ve identified a set of goals and priorities for myself that get to the core of what truly matters.
Hope
I recently finished “The Book of Hope” by Goodall and Abrams. As a pessimist and someone can sink into moments of hopelessness about the future, this book holds so much value for me.
However, it also made me think a bunch about my students and how my classroom operates. Goodall summarizes the components of hope super clearly as the following:
Small, attainable goals
Multiple pathways to accomplishing those goals
Self-efficacy, or the belief that you can be successful
Support in achieving these goals
I am making sure to focus my classroom around these four elements this year. I want any student walking out of my classroom at the end of the year to feel more hopeful, both about their own future and the future of the world in general.
If I can do that, I will have succeeded.
Joy
Anyone who has worked with me or who has seen me in a professional capacity at a conference or workshop in their district knows what I am about to say: I am a very business-oriented person at work. I will overwork myself in an attempt to make everything perfect. I have a tendency to let what I have to do distract me from being truly present.
If I’m not careful, this extends into the classroom and can become a difficult spiral for me, especially when things aren’t going perfectly. I attempt to control more and work harder, and it’s a self-defeating cycle.
More importantly, I end up missing out on the moments I love in the classroom: the laughter, the silliness, the memories.
It is my goal to ensure that joy takes priority over stress.
The Art of Noticing
A few years back I had the hardest 4th period (why is it always 4th period?) class of my life. I was pretty miserable. We all were. I was grumpy, so they were grumpy.
Then I did one little thing that changed everything for me and that class: each day I wrote a sticky note for three students where I thanked them for something or just told them something I was grateful about with them.
I can’t even begin to explain how much that shifted the room, and it had very little to do with the behavior of the students changing (at least initially). What it did was rewire my brain.
I had gotten so used to looking for the negative that those pathways in my brain were way more trained and efficient than the ones designed to see the positive. I was training my brain to trend negatively, but by forcing myself to disrupt that pattern, it began to get easier for me to see the positive in that group.
At first, this only changed things for me. I was a more positive presence in the room, and I was more regulated. However, as a result, the class changed, too. Noticing the good started to produce more of it. Students felt valued and cared about more than before, so our classroom culture shifted in that direction, too.
Let’s be real: it was still a difficult 4th period class, but I now have positive memories from what could have been a miserable year.
Clarity
At the beginning of my teaching career, I was “gifted” a class that was for any student who had poor attendance, bad grades, and unsatisfactory scores on their state tests. It was an intervention classed dressed up with a fancy name. I struggled at first. I tried to do everything and to do it quickly. Clearly, it didn’t go well.
In a conversation with my administrator, as I was asking for help, he said something that really stuck with me. He said, “Don’t do everything. Do only the important things, and for this class, that is to get students reading and writing.”
I still have copies of the books those students wrote that year. We did magical things in that class because of one simple thing: I remembered what was important.
As I jump into a new curriculum, that’s my goal: remember to focus on what’s important instead of getting bogged down in the weeds.
So, here I am. The calm before the storm.
Whenever people say that, the storm is always a bad thing. I disagree. After a year on the road, some of the most beautiful and memorable moments have been the storms, watching lightning spread over the earth as the clouds paint the sky.
That is the storm I’m looking forward to tomorrow.
To my fellow educators, all the love to you. Wishing you the best of years.
