Week 3 / Blog 2 – Response to Tracy Myer’s Blog

My Response to Tracy Myer's Blog:

Tracy, I found your blog entry to be very inspiring. We have ALL been there – in that moment when your teacher hat comes off and the street hat comes on. (I keep a few street hats in my back pocket.) Nevertheless, few teachers have the humility to admit to acting in wrong judgment or apologizing. This becomes especially problematic in this digital age of email and social media. I sometimes find myself preferring NOT to reply to a student email simply because I know my tone is going to be misinterpreted. You have taught your students a valuable Life101 lesson that they will remember far beyond the school year. 

Tracy Myer's Original Post:

Once again I found several interesting points that apply to my everyday personal and work environment while reading this week. These are my take away points or “ah ha” moments from Chapters 5 through 8 of The Art of Possibility. We are all…human and are capable of making mistakes.

I can relate to the story of the conductor apologizing openly to the percussion section for the error he made. This past school year I had several visitors in my class observing my students as well as me. My students are encouraged to talk and interact with one another often so its expected to be loud during class time. However one particular day a few of my students were off task (or so I thought) so instead of me going over to the group I yelled out to them to get to work as I continued with my reading group. I realized very shortly that not only were all of my students working, they were on task and actually creating a debate for their challengers. I stopped the groups brought everyone to circle and apologized to my class 1) for yelling out and 2) for assuming that the group was off task. I discussed with my students the importance of admitting when you make a mistake and apologizing when you are wrong. I can remember telling my students that we are all human and we will make mistakes in life but the important thing is to learn from those mistakes and try not to make those same mistakes again.

For me that was a teachable moment because I had so much remorse about yelling at my students. I had never done that before- the moment those words came
out of my mouth in that tone I could immediately see my 1st grade teacher wagging her ruler at us screaming to the top of her lungs. The truly sad thing about her class was she never treated us like we were human and she never apologized. I never felt good in her class and I made a promise to never treat my children like that and here I am sounding and behaving just like Mrs. Such-In-Such. So I had to make the needed change within me and I had to do it fast because I never want my students to have that mental image or feeling about school that I once had.