Our Superintendent came into our school this week and asked how things were going. I greeted her and responded, "this job is hard!". Elaine is so supportive and reminded me that yes, indeed it is, and that we are in the longest stretch of the school year without time off. It's a long time between the end of August and the last week of November and only have 1 day off. Stamina hasn't yet been developed in our students so signs of fatigue creep in. Like when at home, when I'm tired or my family is, it's hard to stay positive, the house gets a little messier and you often end up working hard to break even, to stay afloat. We're seeing signs of this at school too- students are struggling to stay positive with each other, at times being downright unkind, they talk about being stressed by assignments- even though we haven't increased work expectations since the 1st day of school. They seem to be treading water to survive rather than swimming forward.
2 weeks ago was especially hard. I came home last weekend frustrated having a hard time trying to grapple with the current mood of the school and wanting to fix it. I laid low, stayed quiet and began to get to work trying to address the climate first. As I grow as an educator nothing becomes more apparent to me over and over again than the saying I walked into teaching with from my grad school time at UVM- "They don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care." I have believed this from the second I went into teaching, and 15 (!) years later I believe it now more than ever. So this week I went back to making connections and teaching about it. We started our advisory on Monday talking about "Would you rather", an activity I created asking students to examine the world they would rather live in. The whole activity was deeply moving and the level of participation was more than I could have expected. I feel confident that students left and went into the halls that day as positive agents of change. They went out looking to make their world the one they want.
I sat more with students. I made an effort to connect and check in with phrases like "how are you doing today?", "what do you have exciting going on this week?". I asked these to every student that came to check in work, ask questions about classwork and every interaction I had with students. This work of connecting first, educating second was only reinforced when I went to the Rowland Foundation Annual Conference. The topic of addressing systemic racism, and inequity in our schools and society at large is a heavy one. Nothing about it was comfortable or easy to hear. But it is our responsibility to work towards the goal and make progress one day at a time, one person at a time. The first step, at the heart of it all, is connections. Connecting people, promoting humanness, interrupting the cycle of racism, bias and inequity are what it takes to move society forward. I could see that more work was needed in my curriculum and our school system as a whole.
So next steps, the post is running long... I'm having students dig deep into their culture and background for the next month. As I learned Wednesday in the mindfulness workshop, we need to know ourselves before we can really begin to know others. So students are looking at all aspects of their culture- from their belief structure to their passions to their ancestry. We're also beginning personal interest projects next week around our work on the 19th century in US History. Allowing students to dig deep into something that are excited to research more and teach others about. Advisory work will continue to focus on empathy, kindness and tolerance. Creating a culture where we call others in to our community and call others out for unkind behaviors. Continuing to work on my AMLE presentation about master schedules rebuilds that promote relationships before more curriculum time because why I want our school to rebuild our schedule is because my goal is to have a school-wide advisory. Where all people in our building are working together to promote the values that my students voted on. The words they used to describe their ideal world- LOVE, ACCEPTANCE, SAFE, WELCOMED, SMILES, RESPECTED, TRUSTED.
