It's Not Magic, It's Science!

My first few years of teaching were rough.  I had no idea what I was doing.  There was blood in the water and the sharks were circling.  I was good with the content but my classroom management was less than stellar.  We were a new school with very green teachers and most of us were just trying to keep our heads above the water.  If it wasn't for Ted I never would have survived.  He was the only one of us with more than 5 minutes experience in a classroom. Sometimes I would ask him to stay with my class for a few minutes so I could go in the hall and cry. And, to add insult to injury, I looped with those kids for 3 years, so every mistake I made as a newbie followed me for 3 years.  Not for one second do I blame the kids though.  It was all me and it was awful.  I felt like I was failing them. One day during my first or second year, I was talking to the principal and her advice to me was to be more of a (warning, bad word ahead) bitch.  That is actually what she said to me.  I was

I hope that I am an educator and not a teacher. Let me go back a few steps.   This past week I watched a very good friend of mine give her first TEDx talk on her experiences throwing out grades (and she rocked it!). This event also featured several student speakers.   All the students were fantastic – well spoken, poised and passionate in their delivery. They had a lot of great things to say but two of those things stood out for me.   One student talked about the experiences of students working hard to create projects that only the teacher sees.   This has sparked in me a tiny revolution but I am going to go into that further in another post.   This post focuses on the talk of a young man named Timmy, a senior in high school, who counted off the number of teachers he’d had over the years that he considered educators and not just teachers. As he went on to elaborate about what made a teacher an educator, I just kept thinking, “I wonder if he would call me an educator and not a teac