Never Stop Learning

Never stop learning because life never stops teaching!

If there is one thing life has taught me is that life will always be teaching us something and there are always lessons to be learned through our daily experiences. Life continues to teach us both hard lessons and good life lessons. A life lesson is “a powerful piece of wisdom, knowledge, insight, or self-awareness that you adopt to improve yourself, your relationships, and your life in general. You often need to experience life to learn the lesson.” ~ Peter Nathan

As teachers, things are always changing and we often have to keep up. As we all know, college can only prepare us to be successful in the classroom to a certain point, but the real learning is on-the-job training, and it seems it is year after year as the students and system changes, we have to adjust. There are just too many variables that surround the classroom In the classroom, students are always teaching me lessons. I am always trying to find new techniques and strategies to help my students make connections with the content being explored. This can get stressful and exhausting at times, requiring us to read educational articles and books, attend continuing education courses, etc., but who I have learned most from are my students. If a technique didn’t work well with my students, something else was tried. Sometimes this idea are planned and sometimes it may be a last-minute idea in the midst of a lesson.

I remember one day, I was introducing political, economic, and social aspects of geography. Soon into the lesson when I thought students should have been able to grasp and identify the three aspects, I realized they were not making the connection. So, on a whim, I asked everyone to get up in a circle. and we did a conga line around the room chanting “Political, Economic and Social!” These experiences taught me to trust my gut to have confidence in my teaching abilities and just go with it! There have been times that I have felt stuck and have had trouble coming up with techniques to teach a concept. I like to keep lessons fresh and new; I don’t like redundancy with the same activities or worksheets; I want to keep my students engaged and on their toes. One day, after having writer’s block for which seemed like days, I shared with my students what we would be studying and asked them what they thought would be the best way for them to learn the material. They shared ideas and I took this home and utilized it. Through the years, students have come up with some creative ways to learn material and it provides students autonomy over their learning. Students sometimes know what they need more than we do, and it is important to be open-minded enough to have these conversations with our students to gauge what they think is working and what is not. That day, I learned a lesson to take chances and think outside the box, because you may learn great lessons from our students! By the way, the lesson and how they chose to learn it was successful! This is one reason, we have choice boards in today’s classrooms — so students can learn material while feeling engaged.

There are many times in the classroom that I walk out the door feeling defeated, but this pushes me to do better, to learn more. Even though we hope that every lesson will be successful, we all know the reality is that they won’t. It is important to reflect and realize you did your best and try again. I often had to change up my strategies from year to year based on my student maturity level and needs.

Takeaway Lesson for today: Take chances in the classroom, think outside the box, and don’t be afraid to feel as if you failed; we will definitely have those days and that is okay. Just feel the fear and do it anyway! It may just teach you lessons about your students that will make all the difference in how you teach and how they learn.

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