Schools are filled with kids.
And because there are so many kids coming through our hallways every single day, sometimes what happens is our kids become just numbers. We know our kids as facts and figures, but do we know our kids as people? I truly believe that when we know our kids and know their story, that is when education can really explode into something beautiful!
Friends, whether you are teaching in a massive school that houses thousands of students or whether you are teaching in a smaller community school with less than a hundred students in the entire district, this is for you!
Our students aren’t just numbers!
Sometimes we become so obsessed with knowing data on kids, knowing what their reading level is, knowing how many words they can actually comprehend per minute, what was their state scores last year from state testing, what about their map scores and all these different assessments scores. It’s numbers and data overload! And we become overwhelmed with charts and figures and facts about these kids that quite frankly don’t tell us much about them as people. And so I want to remix our thinking on this. I’m so passionate about taking something that bombards us as teachers and turning it into something beautiful.
And when I think about numbers with students, I want us to think about every number being a student and every student having a story and every single story matters in a school. I want to say that again.
Every number is a student.
Every student has a story.
Every story should matter in a school.
Our kids are walking in with a bunch of data behind them, grades and scores and testing. But more importantly than that, our students are walking through our doors every single day with a story. And those stories should be able to be used to our advantage as teachers. But sometimes in order to do that, we have to be asking the right questions to unlock those stories.
I want to tell you a little story about something that happened in one of my classes here this week. I’m in a brand new building and I am actually teaching a section of high school science for the first time ever in my career. And that caught me a little bit off guard because it was something super new and super different. I’ve been a middle school science teacher my whole career. High school has some learning curves to it, but I’m really starting to enjoy it. And one day I asked my students a question and I said, “how are you liking 10th grade so far?” I pulled a popsicle stick of a student and I asked that student, “all right, how are you liking it so far?” And he said, “I’m hating it.”
“Why do you hate 10th grade?” I asked. “Because I’m not in 10th grade.” He replied.
wait, what? What? I’ve thought I had an entire class of sophomores.
“Okay, sorry man. Uh, did last year’s 10th grade science not go well?” I asked.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that’s not it. This is my first year at this school and this 10th grade general science course wasn’t something that was required in my previous school. So I’m with all of the 10th graders, but I’m actually a junior now.”
Mind Blown.
I know that might seem trivial, but all school year long, all three weeks in, I had been referring to this entire group of students as sophomores. I’d been referring to all of them as 10th graders. And here’s this one kid thinking, “girl, I’m not a 10th grader.” “Girl, I’m not a sophomore.” And I had no, idea. And the reason why I didn’t know his story was simply because I hadn’t asked the right questions yet. And I think some students are very open to sharing where they came from, their open and they are cool with sharing their struggle.
But for so many students until we truly see them not as numbers, but as students and try to find out how that student has a story and understanding that that story matters to how we teach, we are missing out on some really cool learning opportunities.
Now since this post is all about sharing a story and making sure that our stories are making impacts in schools, I felt maybe now it would be a good time to share a little bit about my story. Like how did I get here? Where has my educational journey taken me? And I think there’s two different ways that we can look at this. We can look at it from a teacher that made an impact that led us to being teachers in the first place. Or we can talk about the story of why we are still teaching now. So I would love to give you the cliff notes version of how I ended up here, how I ended up as a middle school and high school science teacher in a rural community, and starting my 11th year teaching.
I knew I wanted to become a teacher my entire life. That was really the only thing that was on my radar. And I loved my first six years teaching and then I experienced some serious and I mean seriously scary burnout.
I wanted to leave the profession.
Then a Lisa Frank folder kind of saved my career. It was this crazy thing that happened in the middle of the Walmart. But that Lisa Frank folder kind of saved my career and it was this catalyst that said, “girl, you’ve got to do something different.”
So part of my story is that I started documenting my story. I kept a super-secret journal that I didn’t tell anybody about. I didn’t want anyone to know I was struggling so deeply. So instead of talking about my struggle openly, I wrote about my struggle. But instead of actually documenting the struggle, I changed my mindset and said, I’m not going to complain about things in this journal. I’m going to find awesome little moments to celebrate every single day in education. And by the end of that school year, my burnout had ended.
In fact, it went from a burn out to this fiery burning passion for the profession again.
And I loved my job. And I also had this secret 180 page journal that has unfolded into becoming a book that is now published called 180 Days of Awesome- Celebrating Every Day of Education. And after that book released, my educational journey got thrown through a tailspin and I started speaking more often and then writing more books.
Friends, we live this crazy journey every single day that we don’t fully understand.
Parts of our stories don’t make sense, but then they turn into these beautiful opportunities to celebrate and that’s what our students are bringing through our doors every single day.
They’re not just numbers. Our students are not just facts and figures.
They’re students who have stories and their stories make a difference in our school and our job as teachers is to unravel those seemingly meaningless moments, those seemingly not important details of their story and weave them into one big beautiful school year.
That is what we do every single day as we live this teacher life.
