Schooooools out for summer

I started working at the June Jordan School for Equity four years ago. Last Friday the class I came in with graduated. It is a rather large milestone as an educator to know you will continue without the class you started with. A certain nervousness sets in, who will torture me with their late papers? Who will call me at all hours of the day and night to ask me questions about how to sign-up for the SAT's? Who will be my friends? But then you realize, just as quickly, that your friends, the ones who are your age, are the people you have been ignoring for the past 10 months and summer is the perfect time to catch up. And really there will be many more questions and late papers soon enough.

Each year I sit in the audience and get all teary eyed because I know what a big deal it is. Some of them are the first in their class to graduate high school, most are the first to go to college. They have often lost someone very close to them, some times a parent, some times a sibling, some times their best friend. Those who have gotten to our stage, have been put through fire and brimstone with a variety of educational benchmarks that other schools don't have.

There is something called and "aha" moment that is used in certain circles. It is basically equivalent to a boulder being thrown at the door of your conscientiousness, forcing insight into plain view. Sometimes it has a snowball effect, as if you were standing at the mountain looking at the snow, marveling at its quiet beauty when all of the sudden an avalanche has covered you. My aha moment came over dumplings after graduation.

This is my big learning from the past 4 years:
It is our job as educators to instill a tremendous sense of self worth and responsibility in young people because it is there job to find their path and place in this world. As life may have it, they may not find this path with any sort of expediency so we must also imbue a sense of passion and patience to sustain a long life. Their dreams will only be possible with a variety of tools and skills most importantly a tremendous imagination. The reason we have dreams is not because we will always assuredly achieve them but because we will learn something that we needed to learn along the way. So as educators, we must inspire the tenacity to walk towards what they love, not because we always believe they will do what they say, but because it is their path not ours.

So our job is the most simple and complex of all things, our job is to get up in the morning and love what we do so they know what loving life looks like every day.

Whew. I have a lot to work on.

No more pencils No more books No more teacher's dirty looks**AC/DC (not that we ever give undeserved dirty looks)