Tag Archives: Success

Feb 20 2010

Success in the Classroom

For me, my success in the classroom will be in two parts.

First, I would like to leave every student with a love of education and a solid grasp of how learning and life interconnect. I would like to teach some of the timeless literature to illustrate the human condition; its choices and challenges. I’d like to teach the arts to give texture and color and sound and rhythm and rhyme to their understanding of being human. I would like to give them a sense of history and how we have come to this place. I would particularly like to leave them literate and fluent in math and science. We are living in a hard science world and to know the gentle parts of life and that hard science is a powerful combination.

At the same time, I am determined to leave my students competent in the standards and capable of demonstrating this in assessments. To do this, my intent is to out ‘essentialist’ the essentialists. If competence is defined as answering questions correctly on an exam then, by golly, that’s exactly, precisely what I will teach them to do. Teach the standard, assess, teach what’s not retained, repeat. No doubt, this will take more time than I have, especially folded on top of top of the progressive/perennial education described above. I think education is important enough to be generous with my time before and after school and to expect students in need of extra help to be generous with their own time as well. With luck, sacrifice and cooperation, we’ll fit it all in and leave the students more than ready for the next step of their life.

Feb 20 2010

Success

I believe that success is learning who you are and who you aren’t. More narrowly, success is learning what you were born to do and doing it. For some people, this involves education. For others, it involves making money. For still others, being with people is what it’s all about. But callings come in all different shapes and sizes; music, plants, teaching, healing, loving, traveling, cooking, the list goes on and on… In our society, the big three indulgences are power, money and sensation. Lots of people pursue those thinking they are worth having for themselves. But, of course, they’re not. They may come with a calling (for Obama, for Steve Jobs, for Hannah Teter), but they are not worth a damn on their own.

If we are really lucky, success includes love, companionship, parenthood and community too. For some people, one of these might be a calling. For others, this trip around doesn’t include some or all of them. Most of us have access to all of them. It’s usually a question of what we make important and whether can we open our hearts and our lives to love. One of the odd things about our society is that being fulfilled frequently comes second, in discussions and in life, to things that won’t mean a thing in our moment of passing.