This is my sixth year teaching. Each year, one of the most difficult days to wake up has been the day we return from winter break.
This year was no different.
After a week of sleeping in, indulging during the holidays on fun with friends and family and delicious cookies, it is difficult to rouse from bed to meet the cold, dark January morning.
While it was hard for me to get up and back into my morning routine, I was able to have a really positive first day back to start 2015. In the past, the journey from January to March has occasionally felt like drudgery, and if that is how I was feeling, I can only imagine what my students were experiencing. Therefore, I made a conscious effort to return to the classroom today with a positive attitude with what made me passionate about teaching from the outset of my career: that learning is fun.
During the course of the school year, especially with all of the various pressures we experience as teachers in the current education climate, it can be difficult to maintain the idealism that I believe brought most teachers to the profession: their passion for learning and the opportunity to share that learning with others. We all find when we enter our careers and begin teaching several classes a day for 180 days is that it is difficult to "hit it out of the park" on a daily basis. The world is bigger than our classrooms, and we, along with our students, lead complex lives. Nevertheless, I made a conscious effort to be excited about my lesson today. I called upon the passion I have for discussing literature and the essential connections it makes to our lives and the joy of sharing that those connections with my students. Because of this attitude, I had fun today, and I think my students did too.
As a new teacher, I had access to this plenty of this idealistic energy. Unfortunately, we all face the reality of a system of education that rarely supports or develops idealistic learning efforts, which is one of the reasons why we have such a high burn out rate among teachers.
Therefore, as I continue to refine and develop my skills as an educator, I plan on continuing to tap into the intellectual curiosity that brought me to teaching. I can't ever lose sight of this. Whenever I plan a unit and a lesson, am I excited to teach it and learn with the students? If not, I need to go back to the drawing board.
