A New Era
From the desk of Alice…
As 2013 is arriving, I am sitting at my kitchen table on a work holiday, typing on a wireless laptop and scheduling this blog to post in the future when I am no longer at my computer. My iPhone is nearby with my calendar at my fingertips and I am texting with friends and checking emails while listening to music on a playlist that I created. Every now and then, I take a break and check Facebook just to indulge myself. I have a car with electric doors, haven’t used a paper map in years, and can order movies from my living room.
If I rewind 20 years to New Year’s Eve 1993, it was half-way through my first year teaching. I think I slept most of the holiday break in an effort to catch up on the sleep I lost my first semester teaching. I have fond memories of that New Year’s when I reunited with some college/childhood friends and we rang in the new year as “grown ups”.
In that first year of teaching, I literally had a reel to reel film projector in my classroom and there may have been 3 computers in the entire school. I certainly had no computer at my house, no internet existed and the word “blog” had not been invented yet. There was no such thing as email or Google in my world. The North Carolina Standard Course of Study existed, but no one could actually find one and we certainly didn’t connect it to the goals in our lesson planning. The End of Grade tests had not been invented, No Child Left Behind had not been passed, and The Common Core was not even a twinkle in anyone’s eye. I had no clear direction with my instruction and honestly, no one cared. It was a different time.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately- how this is a new era of education. We have new teacher evaluation instruments, the Common Core has arrived, and we have resources at our fingertips in a way we could never have imagined. This new era is exciting to me as a professional educator because I am hopeful of the incredible things that can take place in our schools and classrooms. I stand in awe of teachers who continue to love, teach, and grow each student in this new era.
As 2013 unfolds in your school and classroom, I challenge you to live in this year. Resist the urge to teach like I did 20 years ago and instead, lean into this new era just a little.
Give yourself permission to try a new approach and have it not go perfectly.
Give yourself time to play with new materials, understand text complexity, and figure out how to help students problem solve one small day at a time.
Give yourself the patience you used to give your students.
Give yourself credit when it goes well.
Give yourself grace (and those around you) when it all seems so overwhelming.
Above all, be thankful that it is not 1993. Our students need you in 2013 because this is the era in which they will have to survive.