--“Living for something is the hard thing. Living for something extends beyond fashion, glory, or recognition. We live for what we believe.”
To be true to ourselves we have to know what it is that we believe and then live up to it… whether that is in our personal or professional/working lives.
Panache Desai talks about knowing our core selves—from where our souls resonate. In thinking about how this country seems to view education and teachers, I found myself wishing that more teachers could find a way, right NOW, to take it to heart. Desai says that we get so caught up in how others perceive us that we start to believe THEIR truth, not ours. In education in 2013, now more than ever, we need to define what OUR truth is. What is it we believe? Why are we here?
"Our job is the excuse through which we get to love people," Desai says. "We are put in exactly the place that we need to be to love the people that we are around. And so your fulfillment comes from within. But it comes from being open to allow that to happen through you. So your job is the excuse through which you get to love people or through which the Divine gets to love its creation.”
Thinking about Desai’s words, I know it’s true. No matter what job I have had, whether as a factory worker, cashier in a grocery store, secretary, researcher, teacher, literacy coach, I have been able to see that job as an impetus for getting to love others—and to feel loved by others. In the times that I was living for something different than what I believed in, that was when living was harder.
Taking this into today’s educational environment in America, I think many of my colleagues have been feeling swept under, drowned, by politicians’ and corporate America’s beliefs about teaching and learning. Living someone else’s beliefs, particularly what non-educators, non-believers in education try to force upon us is a large part of what is making our jobs so difficult; it’s why we are so stressed that it’s difficult to love your students, your colleagues, your work.
Many of my favorite teaching authors, such as Debbie Miller, Franki Sibberson, and Georgia Heard, encourage us to revisit our teaching beliefs and to align our instruction accordingly. In Franki’s latest book, THE JOY OF PLANNING: DESIGNING MINI-LESSON CYCLES, 3-6, one of the first things she models is thinking through her beliefs about mini-lessons so that she can re-align her work and find harmony between what she knows as a teacher and what her students must practice as readers. She discusses realizing that she should not be doing all of the modeling, all of the work; it’s the students who need the practice and discovery. I love her thinking about how you can’t just have a filing cabinet of materials or packets about teaching certain strategies or texts. She says, “Teach the reader, not the book.” Among other things, this requires mini-lessons that are:
*Designed by teachers who teach and know their students, not corporations.
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