I hung out with my high school English teacher, Mrs. Marshall, last week. You know how everybody has The Teacher? When we talk about why we went into education, we say, āItās all because of this teacher I hadā¦ā Mrs. Marshall is mine. She taught me all four years of high school, and has been my teaching mentor for 13 years of my own career.
Mrs. Marshall was perfect.
She knew everything. She expected a lot from her students, and nobody ever wanted to let her down. I donāt remember her ever even raising her voice; she didnāt need to. The mere thought of her disappointment was enough to keep most of us in line.
I became a teacher because I wanted to be just like her.
Fast forward to present day: I failed. I am nothing like Mrs. Marshall. I yell. My kids do not particularly fear disappointing me. I make blatant, ridiculous mistakes all the time. Ā rs. Marshallās unflappable dignity is notably absent in my willingness to belt out āLet It Goā to get my studentsā attention. This bothered me for a very long time, but Iām beginning to realize that itās okay. I can be a great teacher and be completely different from the great teacher I wanted to emulate.
It turns out, I donāt have to have Mrs. Marshallās calm presence of mind to be a good teacher.
I can be loud and passionate and frequently frazzled. I donāt have to know everything. I can make mistakes in front of my students and let them see how I learn from them. Itās a different styleā¦but itās still good.
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Iāve come to realize that different students need different teachers.
In fact, each student needs different teachers. Think back to your own school days. We needed the mean teacher who created a sense of battlefield camaraderie between the students in their class. We needed the understanding teacher who would cut us some slack. We needed the teacher who drilled us until we knew the material backward and forward, but we also needed the teacher who let us be creative and figure things out for ourselves. No single person can be all that.
Weāre often quick to judge when somebody runs a classroom differently than we do. (Iāll be honest; if I see kids sitting quietly at desks in a colleagueās class, I turn up my nose a little. How can they learn without a little chaos?) But Iād argue that our strength as educators is in our diversity.
In a world that pushes more and more standardization on our craft and our students, itās time to embrace the fact that we all do things differently, and thatās exactly what our kids need.
There are a lot of ways weāre evaluated these days. There are our standardized test scores, of course, and our performance on whatever rubric the district uses, and our student survey scores at the end of the semester. But Iāve found one more way to measure my success as a teacher, although itās not immediately available at the end of the school year. Iāll wait a few years down the road and see how many kids come back and tell me they became teachers because they wanted to be like me. And then Iāll encourage them to fail, because the world doesnāt need more teachers like me.Ā It needs teachers like them.