I love this picture, it was taken a few years ago when my family traveled to Tanzania and had the opportunity to visit a school there. It reminds me of the quote, "When we try to teach kids about life, kids teach us what life is about."
Last semester at Butler, in Block A, on of our themes of the semester was forming personal relationships with our students. As a model of how to do this our professors worked on seeking and finding personal relationships with us. We spent a lot of time getting to know each other, discovering how we learn, what makes us tic, why we want to be teachers and so on. We then took what we learned to our individual classrooms (for me, my precious second graders) and practiced investing in our students as we spent the semester with them.
Why am I mentioning about this you might wonder? Well, today is our last day in Panama and we just had a group reflection as a class. It reminded me so much of my education classes and allowed me reflect and remember everything that I have learned about teaching in this past year. Even as a kamp kounselor this summer at Kanakuk, forming personal relationships, and loving our kids was the key to our success. Without overcoming those walls that people put up you are never going to get to the person behind the mask and have deep and meaningful conversations that lead to real realationships. This theme applies to life and the classroom.
The past three weeks I have been learning about Biology and it really reminded me how much science is not my thing, but most importantly, how passionate I am about children and teaching. After taking education classes for almost a year and a half I became accustomed to being around professors who want to know the real you. Not that professors in other majors don't want this, but they don't go at it in the same way. Because of this, I don't think I responded as well to the class as I could have. I didn't pin point why until today when we were reflecting and I realized that today was the first moment that I really felt like my professor cared about who I am as a person. I'm sure that she does care about her students, but it revealed to me the importance of investing in the lives of your students as teachers. I mean we have been living together for three weeks and I don't think my professor could tell you more than three facts about me. Again, not to bash my professor, she is a really engaging teacher. But when I become a teacher I want my students to feel loved and appreciated. I want them to know that the most important thing to me is not that they learn the material, although that is important. What I am most interested in is making them feel valued and as much of a part of our classroom environment, home away from home, as I am as their teacher. Being away from Butler for more than 4 months now has helped me to realize how great of an education program we have. My professors are amazing models of how good teachers should be and I am more than exited to get back into my content when I return to Butler in the spring! However, in the meantime I am going to continue to get the most of this experience as I can. I am super pumped to be working in the elementary school in Nicaragua and I know a lot of adventure lies ahead for me.
That is my little dose of self introspection for the day! We are off to Nicaragua tomorrow, adios Panama! Have a great weekend everyone!
Love always, Shelby
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