Saturday, March 31, 2018

31 Teaching Truths

Photo by Fischer Twins via Unsplash

31. Believe in magic.

Because teaching and learning are magic, aren't they? Building a classroom community from scratch every year; meeting the ever-changing, ever-shifting needs of a diverse group of learners to the very best of your ability day after day; making a kid's day; making a colleague's day; learning to be a better teacher years or decades into your career...it's all magic. And without these strong threads of magic that we weave in our classrooms, the fabric of our nation...of our democracy...would fray and shred and dissolve.

Believe in magic. Don't ever stop. So much depends on the work you do every minute of every day.



5 comments:

  1. Thank you for your 31 Teaching Truths. They really spoke to me. Especially this last one. You make me realize why I continue to be and want to be the best teacher I can be.

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  2. I will be reading your March truths over and over again, many months after March, Mary Lee. Thank you for this gift.

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  3. Mary Lee, what a gift your teaching truths have been! Please make them into a book. It would make a lovely gift to share with teacher friends.

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  4. We learned on the day before spring break that our Central Office/BoE are ditching the (flawed) in-house curriculum and moving back to publisher-packaged curriculum. We are making this move, as far as I can make out, now, over the summer, right away. I have spent my entire MCPS career trying to make this shit work for my kids, and this feels like they are opening the window and throwing 10 years of my effort out into the dumpster. This is a short, acrid story to demonstrate how much I need your 31 Truths and why #31 especially is a miraculous antidote to systemic violence against teachers. Thank you.

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  5. I absolutely loved reading these. So many of them were entirely spot-on for me! Is there any way you'd make them available as a PDF I could download and revisit? I need to reread all of these periodically! Thanks for considering.

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