It's That Time of Year!

Happy almost May, readers! It's graduation season, and tomorrow I get to be part of the festivities at Northeastern University.  I have the honor of being the guest speaker at the pinning ceremony for NEU's undergraduate education majors.

Since I've been hacking away at my speech this week (it has to be ten minutes long!!!), I thought I'd do myself a favor and double dip here on my blog. So, if you'd like to read some sappy inspiration, I share with you my speech (sorry -- it's kind of long -- did I mention it has to be ten minutes?!!?):

"Good morning. I’d like to thank Dean Caron for the opportunity to speak at today’s ceremony. It is a true honor.

Congratulations to all of you. Certainly, congratulations on graduating and on earning your degrees. The completion of an academic milestone such as this deserves a lot of praise. But I’d also like to congratulate you on your choice to pursue the field of education. In my fully biased opinion, it is the best field out there. Working in education will provide you with challenges large and small; if you let them, these challenges will motivate you, inspire you, and fuel your passion for making a difference in the lives of your students and, perhaps, for making a difference in the field of education at large.

When I first began my educational career in September of 2000, I had a lot of expectations. And I was right about a few things – teaching was going to be awesome, and it was. I would love my students, and I did. But there were boatloads of things I never saw coming, situations that my incessant watching and re-watching of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society and Michelle Pfieffer in Dangerous Minds couldn’t prepare me for. So, today, I’d like to share with you a few things to expect as you enter this wonderful profession.

First, what to expect from the students.

Sometimes, your students will be smarter than you. I’ve taught high school students who have had insights on literature that I would have killed to have come up with. And I’ve worked with first graders who have devised routines and structures for how the classroom should best operate that were way more effective than the teacher’s original plan had been. Don’t let this throw you. Invite your students’ voices in. Expect to learn as much from your students as you hope they will learn from you.

Some of your students will hate school. Don’t take this personally. Some of them will be struggling against a structure of schooling that doesn’t work with their learning style, or with where they are developmentally. Invite these students to become learners. Discover what kind of learning environment will work best for them – do they need the freedom to be able to move around a bit?; Find out what they get excited about – is there a way to work basketball into an upcoming math lesson? Expect your students to learn in different ways from one another and to be interested in different things – learn from these differences and allow them to make you a stronger teacher, someone who can teach all children, not just those who thrive within a traditional classroom setting.

Some of your students will have accomplished amazing feats just by making it to school in the morning. Some are dealing with unimaginable home lives, some are working part-time or even almost full-time hours to help support their family, some are struggling through substance abuse and addictions. Expect to be needed desperately by these students – expect them to need compassion, expect them to need a hug, or the occasional granola bar for breakfast. Most of all, expect them to need you to believe in them, to need you to give them important work to do and important things to strive for.

And here’s something I can promise you to expect from ALL of your students. They all want to succeed. It doesn’t matter if they act like it or not. It doesn’t matter if they’re acting up in class for a multitude of reasons, reasons that can sometimes be seen, but are often unseen. No child comes to school hoping to fail that day. Help them to succeed.

There are a few things you should expect from adults, too.

Expect lots of advice and expert opinions (even from those who have never stepped foot in a classroom as an educator). You may or may not have noticed that I’m five months pregnant. And as a woman who is in the middle of her first pregnancy, I now consider myself a bit of an expert on getting a lot of advice thrown my way, often unsolicited. And most of that advice seems to be designed to scare the living daylights out of me.

It’s not all that different from the amount of unsolicited advice and opinions that come your way as an educator.

I’m not always sure why so many people prefer to focus on the negative. But, oh, they are out there. You’ll find them in the staff room among your fellow educators, and you’ll find them on social media among your Facebook friends. There seems to be a lot of negativity floating around out there – there are some people and some sources that will want to fill your mind with all the perceived barriers to being a good teacher. They’ll tell you you can’t teach effectively these days because of the Common Core, or because of standardized testing, or because of a certain school’s discipline policies.

And I won’t sugar coat it – these things can get in your way at times. They can be frustrating. But they do not have to limit your effectiveness as a teacher. I work with teachers every day who teach engaging lessons, who find ways to motivate and challenge all students. They find ways to do this because they have kept their eyes on the prize. The students themselves.

You’re in education to shape young minds. You don’t have to let anything stand in your way of this. You can start, in big and small ways, to break down some of the barriers that traditional structures of education have put in place. You can encourage girls to pursue studies of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. You can inspire them to be leaders. And the young boys? I’ll be the mother of a young boy in about four or four-and-a-half months. You can encourage him to love learning. You can provide structures in his elementary school classroom that are developmentally appropriate for a seven or eight year old boy. You can make it possible that learning doesn’t have to be about sitting still and quietly listening for 45 minutes.

I’m here to tell you that this is possible. Maybe you’ll work in a non-traditional school that’s finding exciting and new ways for classrooms and for learning to function. Maybe you’ll work in a public school that is committed to the Common Core and to standardized testing. I’m here to tell you that, in either setting, you can be an effective educator.

How? First, take a lesson from my pregnancy and don’t listen to the naysayers. They’re going to be out there. Avoid them. Surround yourself with strong mentors. And I’m not talking about just your first year or so of teaching, here. Surround yourself with strong mentors throughout your career. I’m 14 years in, and I still meet up regularly with positive, strong educational influences.

And don’t stop there. Insist on being a lifelong learner. Continue your education, formally or informally. Read, read, read. Read stuff by people who are on the same page as you. And read stuff by people who stand for things you think you may disagree with. Be open to having your mind changed. Go to workshops. Take classes. You can be the positive voice the field of education needs now. More importantly, you can be the positive voice our students need now.

Thank you, and, again, congratulations."

Thanks to all the educators in my current and past school districts for teaching me about a lot of what I included in this speech -- that there are effective, wonderful educators in this world doing great things and changing students' lives!!