The last few weeks (6) have found me in South Dakota, Iowa, and then five weeks in Chicago. In all that time, I haven’t written. Not because I haven’t thought of my people at home. Rather because I wanted my first real entry to be a statement of faith in the cause.  I did not want my early entries to be sessions of complaining into which people with blogs so commonly find themselves falling.  

I have in the last two weeks learned a little about how I think this life in education should be compartmentalized. I’ve found myself asking my co-workers about their “teacher day” which while it may seem like a weird question is simply my way of acknowledging that we are all people with fascinating lives. But that some days our day in the classroom went really poorly, but life in general is going well. Or our lives outside of the classroom are lonely, or frustrating, or hurt, but inside the classroom we’re closing the achievement gap and seeing progress.  I understand that this duality will undoubtedly feed into each other, but I also understand that my worth as a person is not decided by my skills as a teacher, and my skills as a teacher are not determined by my worth as a person. There has to be a line, a fine line, but a line all the same.  

My people days, as of late, have been lonely days. Feeling excluded in this community and distant from people who love me.  These days it has felt like I only have teacher days, and even my weekend which should belong solely to me as a person, are all consumed by my teacher life, sometimes out of defense from the lonely. 

But my teacher days are far more interesting. I have good days and bad days and our little class that started as 5 then went up to 6 then down to 3 is now back up to being 8 students strong. Tomorrow is the last day of summer school, it’s test day, and truth be told short of something terrible happening, I KNOW they will do well. The progress that they’ve made in the last 4 weeks, in 16 days of teaching totaling 64 hours of instruction, are astounding. They have worked so hard and mastered SO many things. But I think the result that I am most proud of from our fourth grade classroom, is not the individual skills that they have managed to overcome, but rather the change in their feelings about school. Being in summer school usually has some torturous connotations, but the classroom investment and weird things we’ve done in the class have made this “not so bad” as one of my students said yesterday. But more interesting, has been seeing the change in their beliefs in their own genius. We started with kids who were both behind and discouraged, and constantly messaged that different things were hard for different people. We talked about malleable intelligence, and how no one is born smart. We get smarter by working on things we’re not good at and practicing the things we are good at. 

Yesterday was a good teacher day. Monday I had taught finding or differentiating between facts and opinions, Tuesday I had to teach using facts to support an opinion. My kids killed this objective. They answered questions during the intro to new material. They ripped through the guided practice. The correctly supported other people’s opinions with facts. They were given an article and they made their own opinion and supported it with facts from the reading. I gave the WHOLE class the “bonus activity” and they finished in a matter of minutes. With 7 minutes left in my class, having thrown every tiered up activity I could at them, I had to think on my feet. The kids had been working with a template that looked like this: 

____________ believe(s) ______________________________________because

1.________________________________________________________________

2.________________________________________________________________

3.________________________________________________________________

Realizing that they had a template left blank on their sheet I said, “ok now we’re going to write an opinion about ourselves, and support it with facts. I gave the example, 

Ms. Bos believes that she is awesome because: 

1. She graduated from Michigan State 

2. She teaches fourth grade

3. She lives in South Dakota

We then came up with how we would check each of those facts, then I cut the kids loose to write their own opinions. Of my 7 kids, (we were missing one) 6 came up with 

“I believe I am smart” as their opinion and “I work hard in class every day” (or some variation of it) as their first point. I can’t lie. I was so proud of them and their declarations of malleable brilliance.