And now for the BIG one...
THE reason...
priority NUMERO UNO...
for why I love my job...
...
...
...
I love watching kids learn.
I love watching kids discover something new about themselves.
I love watching them work out their social drama, and I wonder how I ever survived middle school.
I love watching them have debates about the strangest things.
I love watching the learning process without worrying about grades or mindless homework.
I love watching a silly song take form, sung by only one at first, but soon joined by the whole class for a chorus or two.
I love watching them make meaningful connections between the material we're studying and the world in which they live.
I love watching kids play with magnetic root word poetry on the grayboard. Octoplatygastrology, anyone?
I love watching one child help another with geometry and hearing the assistee say "Ooooooh, I get it now!"
I love watching kids figure things out without worrying about whether I'm keeping up with the correct Virginia Standards.
I love watching kids attack a project, knowing that every child will come up with a different solution.
I love watching the enthusiasm that results from an assignment with true relevance.
I love watching kids learn.
***********************************
As this blog gets rolling, I'll get into more specifics for teaching strategies, materials, and creative problem-solving. For the first few posts, though, the focus is going to be on why I'm doing this: Why am I blogging? Why do I teach? Why do I love what I do?
What fun to see specifics about why you love teaching gifted students and realize that if I had taken time to do the same thing, I would have come up with a high degree of "correlation." (Don't tell my Statistics prof. at GMU that I used that word in this context. I might be wrong!)
ReplyDelete