That’s me in 1968, the year I graduated from college. I just found this picture in an old photo album and I immediately flashed back in time, remembering the end of my college days and that delicious feeling of excitement and anticipation, knowing that I was about to embark on an amazing adventure called LIFE AS A TEACHER! I had no real-life teaching experience under my belt, although I had already been to Japan and Korea working in a leprosy colony. Since I couldn’t consider student teaching as “real life”, I was about to find out how to apply everything I had learned in the best teacher training institution, the University of Iowa. To do this I traveled 1/2 way around the world to set up a classroom in the middle of the desert in Kuwait. I started my first year of teaching with 16 third graders from 14 countries all in one tiny room in a real live abandoned sheik’s palace. I felt like I was living the story I had read in the old testament about the city and the tower of Babel…instead of one unified language we all spoke different languages with the only commonality being the few words of greeting in English that each student could recite.
Okay, I am getting to the lesson planning part. Remember this was my first year of teaching. I knew how to write lesson plans. I had done that quite successfully in my teacher training program. But this was the real McCoy. I spent hours and hours figuring out ways to teach content when so many students did not speak English and I had practically no resources. I quickly learned that having students work together was the best way for everyone to be successful. I wrote detailed plans in 4 subjects (language arts, math, social studies, and science). I created projects for groups of 4 to do and taught them how to share with their art and music and very little English. I turned those plans over to my veteran administrator, Dr. Guy Lott, who was the principal and superintendent combined, and I immediately discovered what an amazing teacher he was. He always read my lesson plans, always gave them back to me in person, and was the first to teach me an important life lesson about supporting others: be open, be honest, and offer guidance and feedback with “two to glow on and one to grow on “.
Every single week I learned something new about myself as a teacher and how to make lessons exciting and accessible to all my students. I have never forgotten that piece of advice. I use it daily in my work with teachers and I like to think that I have always tried to support my elementary students with two compliments and just one way to improve at whatever they were doing. I remember having my fifth graders do a weekly self-evaluation with two “successes” and one “opportunity for growth”. (*See the P.S. at the end!) I know that if you are reading this you are thinking about how this applies to you. I hope you will take it to heart. Finding the positives first, in ourselves and others, is how we do our part in this less than perfect world.
Back to my scrapbooks and more memories,
Jan
P.S. Look what I found… a professor who uses the “two to glow on ” in his/her evaluation forms! Isn’t the internet amazing! http://www.csupomona.edu/~dmgrasmick/ged550/finalproject_eval.html
Jan's Timely Tips for Teachers 