My eighth year students and I are preparing a yearbook to commemorate the 2008-09 school year. Now comes my annual bout of melancholy as my colleagues and I prepare to say goodbye to our oldest students who will be leaving us for high school. They're ready to move on to new challenges, a bigger school, new friends and opportunities, higher learning....
The yearbook project gives me an opportunity to reflect on the times we've shared and reflect on my teaching and their learning. I'd like to say that every moment was a teaching moment, that we never wasted a minute, but that wouldn't be true. I'd like to say that I always provided the best possible instruction as I crafted amazing lessons that brought my students to deep levels of understanding.
However, despite the minutes that may have been "wasted" on too much chatter, too much laughter, too much lecture, too much digression... there are many stand-out moments that I gather in my mental yearbook.
We actually started the year with an Academic Olympics shortly after the Beijing Olympics. Students competed in events that showed me their prior knowledge and introduced them to topics we would be studying all year. They liked the chocolate medals they proudly wore while we played their country's theme song.
I love the times we jumped out of the lock-step textbook curriculum and found our own connections to the big ideas we were learning. Watching students explore, map, and clean up Myron Lake while we went on our own "Corp of Discovery", exploring the "Smithsonian Museum of Antiquities" they created, laughing at their rap lyrics that taught important points from colonial history, or crying while they presented their speeches about times important to them.
I felt so much pride at the level of quality and rigor they demonstrated while doing research papers with annotated bibliographies. These took me over a week to read, but I count that Spring Break under our skylight as a relaxing and joyful memory.
I'll never forget studying George Washington's precedents at the same time we inaugurated our first African American president.
I also think about the day Dee Eberhart from Ellensburg (a speaker provided by the Seattle Holocaust Resource Center) visited my classroom. He helped liberate Dachau Concentration Camp in the winding down days of WWII. His clear first-hand descriptions of the horrors of war and man's inhumanity kept a group of rowdy 7-8th grade students captivated for 2 hours. He reminded us of the high price soldiers pay to protect our freedom and the freedom of others. The students videotaped his presentation and will create a documentary film to give our local museum archives.
These moments of opportunity and action are the best part of learning.
So little time is left to make sure students KNOW what they need to know, to make sure they FEEL our loving support for them as they move forward. They many not remember everything about their days in middle school, but I hope that the most important lessons and memories remain. And I hope they'll come back from time to time (as so many of them do) just to say "hello" and "I'm doing great!"
Irene Smith is a guest blogger and teacher in the Yakima School District.
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