Helping Students Connect
What do teachers remember from a year? Is it the one student who we do not think we reached or the majority of the students we hoped we served. As a teacher, getting caught up in what students ought to know and how to help them retain that information is all-encompassing. Knowing if we are successful can take years to discover or the feedback can be as immediate as a smile or a look of understanding. We are haunted by our failures and hopeful in our successes.
As I think of former students, I ask what do students remember from classes they have taken: do they remember the allusion Rose Aylmer (Uncle Jack’s cat in To Kill a Mockingbird) creates? Do they know the specific literary definition of an apostrophe, the calling out to an entity that may or may not hear? Can they list specific comma rules with accuracy? Some students may, but the vast majority of them remember the emotional experience they had and the connections they made to their own lives; they remember the ideas that made an impression, and they remember those assignments into which they put effort.
As a teacher, getting caught up in what students ought to know and how to help them retain that information is an all-encompassing passion. After thirty-one years in education, I still love thinking of new ways to help students become better learners, more thoughtful individuals, and kinder people. From my work, I hope they learn “to think about things” that they “do not think about,” to remember that “life is a banquet,” and to take joy in the small things that happen around us everyday.