A conflicted teacher

 `Reality is a question of perspective´ Salman Rushdie  Sometimes we all get stuck. I see it happen to my students all the time. They have a certain way of looking at something, and they are unable to look at it from a different angle. It's like one of those drawings where when you look at it you either see a duck or a fox. But once you've seen the duck? You can never ever unsee it.  The trick of course, is to change your perspective, to take a step back and look at the problem from another angle, in other words: change your approach. But, this is easier said that done. Our brains are funny things and stubborn to boot, and not just our brains, our behaviors too! We don't like changing course once we've set out to do something, or at least I certainly don't. It takes something radical, something completely different to change my perspective once I have gotten truly stuck. Today, serves as an excellent example, for it was an unbelieveably hellish day due to many reas

  "No significant learning can occur without a significant relationship" James P. Comer When reading any literature written on the topic of teaching after 1990 you will find that a good relationship with your students is seen as the succes to teaching. By putting in the effort and building a relationship with your students you ensure that they are more likely to listen and more willing to learn from you. This is why, in teacher training, aspiring teachers are told time and again to invest in their bond with the students. Both teachers and teachers-to-be have endless ways of doing so, ranging from journaling, to informal talks in the hallways, to ensuring that in-class activities focus on the interest of the students. However, one thing is rarely mentioned, and that is the importance of showing your students who you are, not as a teacher, but as a human being .  I was eleven when I first went to high school and the first teacher I ever encountered, my mentor, who was also a ma

 "Life isn't a matter of milestones, but of moments" Rose Kennedy  Ask anyone and they will say that I am great at calling the glass half empty. If pessimism was an Olympic sport, I would have been a gold medal winner five times over. Why? Well, because I fundamentally believe that humans are terrible, society is worse and life as we know it is always out to get us. I'm great at sarcasm, I excel at insults and criticizing stuff is like my main hobby. Put that way, I honestly believe that these do not sound like the best characteristics for a person in charge of educating the minds of impressionable teenagers.  I would like to point out that I do have the capacity for optimism, and definitely experience moments of it throughout every day. However, when your default setting is to always look at the glass half empty, these moments can quite easily be forgotten. Therefore, in the past two weeks it has been my personal goal, to recognize and celebrate these small moments o

It's been a while since my last post. Summer vacation was filled with surgery, recovery and misery and the first few weeks of the schoolyear were filled with, well, I can't quite remember, but they were definitely filled with a lot.  And so, the first week before Autumn break is the first time I find myself not only with a topic to write about but also the time to sit down and actually write about it. As you might have noticed the title of this post is a little commanding, using an imperative form and an explanation mark just to show how serious I am about this topic.  As a teacher I obviously do not mind talking since it is, after all, a rather large part of my job. But.. not such a large part as some people seem to think it is. And with people.. I mean other teachers. In the past few weeks I have been doing a lot of lesson visitations as part of a new task (the details of it not pertaining to the rest of this post) and boy, it is an understatement to say that I did not have t