As I am in the middle of my 27th year of teaching, my husband is in his 31st year, and my daughter is doing her student teaching to prepare to enter the teaching profession, I’ve found myself doing a lot of thinking about what makes teaching a sustainable profession.
When I think back to my very first year of teaching, I remember how nervous and unsure I was. It was so hard to keep my head above water that year, but I was so motivated and excited because I finally had my own classroom, something I had been dreaming about since childhood.
That year was tough. I had 32 students in my first class. It was a blended class of 3rd and 4th graders, and the numbers were quite lopsided. I had 26 third graders and 6 fourth graders. So, not only did I have to learn how to teach the third-grade curriculum but the fourth-grade curriculum as well. There was not enough time in a day to teach two curriculums, so as a first-year teacher I had to figure out a way to blend the two curriculums in a way that would benefit all my students.
If that wasn’t enough of a challenge, it was a tiny school, so I was also responsible for teaching music and PE to my students. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing in those subject areas, so I did the best I could with my own background knowledge. In PE I taught my students how to do the Macarena and some other line dances because I knew how to do that. In music, I would put the lyrics for a song up on the overhead projector (yes, I said “overhead projector”). This feels like writing about the dinosaur days. But I would put a song up on that projector, find some background music, and we would try to sing the songs. I even attempted to teach them how to play the recorder. We had fun, but I’m sure my attempts at teaching those subjects did not follow what would have been the recommended curriculum (if I had a curriculum), and it would have been much better if there was a teacher qualified in those subjects teaching the class.
As my career progressed, I found my way. Eventually, I reached a point where I wasn’t just surviving every year, I was enjoying the work, and I was getting good at it.
After about eight years of teaching, I moved back to my home state, and I got a job teaching sixth graders. This led me to find the subject I was best at teaching, and that subject was language arts. During my first-year teaching sixth graders, we had to participate in the district’s writing assessment. That year, my students received the highest scores in the district for 6th grade writing. Our curriculum specialist came to my classroom to personally congratulate me on that achievement. She said the scores on the writing assessment weren’t everything, but that those scores don’t happen by accident. It took exceptional instruction. That made me feel good to receive that recognition, although I felt I had just been winging it that year. We were enjoying our writing time, and my students had shown so much growth, but I didn’t feel like I really knew what I was doing at that time.
The next year, I moved to the middle school where I’ve been teaching 6th grade English Language Arts for the past 18 years. Now I am at the point where I know what I am doing, and I can put more of myself into my teaching, rather than just trying to follow a canned curriculum.
A few years ago, I started putting a “Quote of the Day” on the board. I was getting them out of the book 365 Days of Wonder by R.J. Palacio. They were all positive motivational quotes about kindness and being who you are, and I felt it added a positive vibe in our classroom.
Last year I started looking up my own “Quotes of the Day” to match whatever my lesson for the day was.
For example, a few weeks ago when we were working on revising our poems, our quote of the day was “We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve,” by Bill Gates. It’s fun to find quotes that line up with our lessons, and I found that one by just Googling “quotes about revising” or “quotes about making changes.”
Two years after I started posting a “Quote of the Day”, I started adding a “Song of the Day” to our routine. I would select a song to have playing as the students entered the room each day. The song would have something to do with the subject of the lesson we were working on that day.
For example, when we were doing a lesson on action verbs a few weeks ago, the song of the day was “Jump” by Van Halen. Jump is an action verb, so that serves as what teachers call an “anticipatory set.” It gets the students thinking about the lesson before class even starts.
I always choose the songs because they must be school appropriate, but students can make recommendations by sending me an email with their song choice and how it would connect to something we’re learning.
A few years ago, one of my students recommended “Everything at Once” by Lenka. I had never heard the song before, but she was right. It was full of similes which is what we had been studying. I’ve used that song to go along with my simile lesson ever since.
I make a “Song of the Day” playlist on my Pandora account. Then, when we need a playlist of school appropriate songs, I put that on shuffle and let it play in the background while we work.
It’s not hard to find songs to go with lessons these days thanks to Google and AI. I just type in something like “songs with metaphors in the title,” and in seconds, I’m supplied with lists of possible song choices. Sometimes it takes a little time to find just the right one, but now that I’ve done it for two years, I can re-use many of my old “Songs of the Day.”
This year I have added two more “Of the Day” categories, “Fact of the Day” and “Joke of the Day.” I look up a fact that matches our lesson. Often, it’s definitions of terms we are using in class. I always include the name of the source where I found that information, so even when we are working on narrative writing, they are preparing for upcoming lessons on research when we talk about different sources of information during the “Fact of the Day.”
“Joke of the Day” was added because my school is working on school climate and culture. I thought it would be enjoyable to have a “Joke of the Day” that goes along with our lesson as well. For example, next Monday, when my class is working on improving word choice and how to use an online thesaurus, this will be our “Joke of the Day.”
“I got the world’s worst thesaurus. Not only was it terrible, but it was also terrible.”
-Author Unknown
This joke is only funny if you know what a thesaurus is, which inspires my students to understand the terms we use in class, so they can understand the “Joke of the Day” too. It’s surprising how easy it is to find cheesy, student-appropriate jokes online. It takes very little time, and laughter is good medicine any day in a classroom.
All of these “Of the Day” routines just take a minute to read out loud at the beginning of class. Sometimes, if we have extra time, we go over the names of the authors of the quotes, songs, and we look up the website where the “Fact of the Day” came from. So, while they’re learning content for my ELA class, they are also learning history, current events, and about locating sources.
Once I started all of these “Of the Day” routines, I realized it was taking me a ton of time to write all of this on the board every day. My school is all about “student agency” right now and getting students to be more involved in their learning, so last year I had students apply for jobs in the classroom. One job is to be the person who writes the “Of the Day” song, quote, fact, and joke on the board. Instead of silent reading at the beginning of 7th period each day, that person changes the board, so it is set up for the next day. If they are going to be absent, they train a “sub” to do it for them. It’s an unpaid position, and they must have good handwriting and be attentive to copying things down correctly. It’s the same person for the whole year unless they want to quit their job. Then they have to give me two weeks’ notice and train the next person. I’ve done this for two years now. No one has quit yet. I have an employee lunch at the end of the year where I buy all my student “employees” take-out lunch for all their extra work doing their jobs, and we eat together in the classroom that day.
I was thinking of my “Of the Day” routines that have developed over the past many years. My lesson plan book is beginning to look like a work of art with all the time I’ve spent connecting songs, quotes, facts, and jokes to the lessons I teach. It is a work of art. Teaching is a work of art. I hope in the looming changes coming to education in my district and throughout the country, that fact is not forgotten. Education is not a canned program. The people in the classroom matter, and that is something that should never change.
