Ebjournal Revisited.

This is why I heart teaching…

A quick story:

In my classroom, we are a community. We work together, have fun together, and learn together. As a communtiy, we all have jobs. My job is to help students learn, to give them band-aids, and to be surly at them when they don’t realize how smart they really are. The students’ jobs are to work hard, ask questions, and do their best. To foster the sense of community, instead of me passing out papers, sharpening pencils, sorting papers, etc., the students get to have jobs in the classroom. We have have approximately 18 jobs in the room, including 2 alternates for when students are absent or out of the room. Howver, since I couldn’t think up any more jobs (”Uh… you’re in charge of turning off the lights…”) there are around 8 students during any given time that do not have any jobs. We say in the classroom that they are on vacation, and the running joke is that they should send postcards, and relax. Every once in a while, a student tells me that they’re enjoying their vacation, and I’ve even had students that make fake post cards at home and bring in to share. It’s all in good fun, all in the name of building community.

At the end of the day today. I go to my mailbox in the office and I see a polar bear postcard sitting with the rest of my teacher crud. I turn in over, and yes, it’s a real postcard. That got sent in the mail at the beginning of the week. It read “Dear Mr. K. I am having a lot of fun on my vacation. I can’t wait to get my next job. From,
‘Bob’.”

Seriously? The kid sent me a real postcard! Made my day, made my week, might’ve even made my month, because it shows that at least ONE student is buying into the community idea, and enjoying themselves. I can’t wait to share it with the rest of the class tomorrow.  I’m still chuckling over it.
I heart teaching.

RSS Trackback URL 22. February 2006 (22:31)
Filed under: General, School Daze