What kind of teacher do your students want you to be?
August 21, 2008If you’re finding yourself nervous about the first day of school, you’re not alone. The first ten days set the tone of your classroom for the entire school year, and the very first day sets the tone for your first ten.
Blogger Dan Meyer ruminates today on the first day of school and making a first impression with students by angling “severe eyebrows at anyone who’d suggest The Jonas Brothers aren’t the best summer band of all time.” Meyer astutely profiles the kind teacher students want based on his experience as a high school math teacher:
In two sentences, here is the teacher profile that will do you the most good with the most students. Your students want a teacher who is capable of unkindness but who chooses instead to be kind, a teacher who is capable of severity but who chooses levity instead.
They don’t want a cruel teacher, obviously, but neither do students appreciate a teacher made of soft edges and kittens, someone wholly unfamiliar with the unkindness they must endure on a day-to-day basis.
That definition sounds pretty good to me, but one of the best things about Meyer’s blog is that he has developed a smart, thoughtful readership, and some of his readers are disagreeing in the comments section, so be sure to check that out as well. And while we normally love it when you comment on Instructify, we’ve turned comments off for this post — we hope that if you have something to contribute, you’ll join the conversation that’s already brewing over there. So, what kind of teacher do your students want? -ROSS WHITE
The Teacher Your Students Want via dy/dan
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