My Corner for Education

On Friday, I received another lunch award in my mail box. At school, we give out two awards each week to the best Primary class and Junior class. This week’s award is another addition to many that my students have won this year. The other day I was going through some of the boxes I packed for the new classroom. I came across all the weekly lunchroom awards that had been awarded to my class this year. (I took them down from the wall before the move and I was too busy to notice the number of awards in the pile.) So, I counted all them when I took them out of the box. They have won 26 awards all together. That means, in addition to the latest award from last week, my class has won 27 weeks out of all 38 school weeks this year! How amazing they are!

I have the most well behaved class ever out of all classes I had taught for the last 11 years. I am really amazed at the way my students have turned out this year. They are able to take in every bit I taught them and internalize the rationale behind each and every rule in the classroom and at school. Our Behaviour Teaching Assistant praised me for the way I have trained them because this class has been as well-behaved as the one last year. I humbly told her that it is really the students’ effort. The class I had last year was under my care for two years, so all the students were familiar with my set of rules for the second year. The class this year has a very small group of 18 students. Usually a smaller class is easier to handle. I told her that if the class next year will perform just as well as the last two, then I would be glad to accept her compliments. But, honestly, deep down in my heart, I was just so proud of my students, all of them!

For the last two years, I spent a lot of time on promoting character development within my class. The community where I teach has been through a lot of changes, unfortunately, not for the better. The school location is becoming a very rough neighbourhood. Children come to school with baggage from home, some of which are due to societal factors that simply beyond school’s realm of responsibility. For a school community like ours, teachers have to take up a lot of professional responsibility for promoting academic achievement as well as social responsibility for ensuring the well beings of the students. The most difficult part of the job is dealing with students’ behavioral problems.

Sometimes, teachers are in conflict with many parents who are helpless with parenting strategies or with parents who are delinquent themselves and lack respect for themselves or the school. Often times, they simply choose to ignore or openly despise school’s authority. Children who grow up in this kind of family environment also learned to disrespect others. It takes tremendous effort to teach these children to become future rule-following and law-binding citizens, and more importantly, to respect others.

Before the students can apply and practice the concept of respect, they have to be taught directly about the concept of empathy and how to relate their feelings to others’. They have to be able to understand and emulate the feelings of others in order to show respect with sincerity. I often tell them to put themselves in someone else’s shoes to understand how the other person would feel. If they were put in the same situation, would they feel the same way, or would they take the same action? It was not easy to teach this lesson to kids (as well as adults) who have been taking things for granted while growing up. Nowadays, some children and adults alike are very self-centred and often failed to see beyond the thought of “I” in the modern society. Often times, they quickly criticize others when things don’t turn out the way they wanted them to be. I always tell my students not to point the finger at others because whenever you point your finger at others, three fingers on that hand also point towards “yourself”. I ask them to always reflect on the issue and “self” first instead of jumping into conclusion and blaming others, which is extremely difficult for all of us to do, including myself.

This year I adopted a program called T.R.I.B.E. (http://www.tribes.com/index.html), which was designed by a group of teachers from the States. I strongly recommend this program to teachers around the world. Many of my practice echo the principles in the T.R.I.B.E. program. I went through the training this year and discovered the similarities between this program and my teaching at school. After my T.R.I.B.E. training, I immediately translated all my rules and classroom practice into the common language as in the T.R.I.B.E. program. My students adopted the T.R.I.B.E. concepts well, and they quickly formed a community circle. Following the program, I put them in different tribes and they have worked cooperatively ever since. It took a lot of effort to follow through with the program, but more importantly, it requires willingness to make it work.

The end of May before we took the Ontario provincial test, I spent a lot of time to review the entire curriculum that I have taught in class. One day it was extremely hot in the afternoon, we simply could not function well in a heated stuffy portable. I was overly frustrated that my students did not respond to a simple math concept that I had just explained to them 20 minutes ago. I told them how disappointed I was about the way they responded using the “I Message” (to simply put, the message of expressing disappointment without targeting the blame using “you”). After my frustrating rant following with my explanation, one by one, my students raised their hand to tell me that they could understand how frustrated I was because they had the same experience when others did not pay attention to what they wanted to tell them.

“I understand how you feel because I felt the same way when I tried to explain to my little sister about….”

“I felt the same way when no one paid attention to what I wanted to tell them....”

“It happened to me once when my brother did not listen….”

At that point in time, I totally forgot about the math concept I was trying to review in that hot afternoon in May. I was too touched to care about the Mode or Medium in Data Management. I just wanted to celebrate how much my students have learned to use “I Message” to tell me that they understood my feelings. The sincere look on their face to confront my frustration was priceless. I was so proud of them, the children in my class of 2007.

To my Class of 2007:

Your teacher just wants to hug every single one of you. I know you are ready to move on to be a better person in the years to come. I BELIEVE in YOU!