Understand your own responses. What are your
buttons, and what do you do when they are pushed?
If you find yourself giving up on a child, ask yourself
'In what way is s/he pushing my buttons so that my
response is to stop caring for her/him anymore?'
Getting back to my angst about 'liking children,' I asked "Can you like all children? Or do you end up liking some and not liking others?" Above is a response that made a lot of sense to me.
"In education, it is my experience that those lessons which we learn from teachers who are not just good, but who also show affection for the students, go deep into our minds. Lessons form other sorts of teachers may not. Although you may be compelled to study and may fear the teacher, the lessons may not sink in. Much depends on the affection from the teacher."
ReplyDelete- His Holiness the Dalai Lama
My co-teacher and I have been teaching together for 7 years and we have a strategy that came to us in the first year of our teaching together. This is probably absolutely unethical but because the outcome has always been so darn healthy, we do it every year. Around the 2nd month of school (once the honeymoon period is over and the kids begin to show their true colors)we each write down the names of 1/2 of our class. The names have to be of those kids that we love the most. Believe me this is so hard to do because you'll truly feel like you love them all. We then compare lists. We check which kid/s didn't make either of our lists and then we make a point of spending as much time, energy and LOVE into recognizing those children for the rest of the year. My theory is that the children who didn't make it into our lists will probably not make it into any one else's lists and the ones who did make it in our list are the generally popular kiddos anyway. Even though we think we give equal attention to all of our students, the truth is that we actually give more positive attention to those who seem sharper, cuter and more aware. So it is up to us teachers to understand the children who can otherwise fall through the cracks and then love them dearly. Once you have accomplished that, you can teach them quantum physics in Kindergarten and they will understand (well, hypothetically).
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