A new school year

It’s been a while since my last post but this evening I decided to take some time just to think about how the new school year is going. I suppose all teachers will agree that starting again after the summer holidays is hectic. We have new classes, new students and lots of new ideas and proposals. We begin full of energy and things go well. Then, we find that some of our students don’t have the same proposals or energies.

I suppose most teachers would agree that they think they know better than their students about what’s best for them, just as they learnt from their own teachers.

Behaviour problems start popping up and the students are to blame. Or are they? In fact, is anyone to blame?

Carme Lupon, one of the founders of my school, now retired, taught me one of the most important lessons I ever learnt. To be a teacher, you have to love children.

During a school day it’s easy to forget this because you’ve got to cope with so many things. You end up thinking more about whether you will be able to correct the latest papers on time or prepare a meeting with parents instead of remembering to ask John how his mother feels today or Sarah about her sick cat. These may seem simple examples but all of our students arrive at school with their own issues and it’s so easy to see our own issues as more important.

Most teachers would probably agree with me that our aim as teachers is to ensure that the student is at the centre of the learning space we try to create in class but we can’t forget that we may not have had all our students in mind when we decide how to teach a class.

Classes may go well or badly, but don’t forget that the most important thing is to love all our kids, and that, in my humble opinion, means putting them before ourselves.