Best Day in Education
For me, my 'Best Day in Education' occurred over the time period of a few days. May of 2018 was the first year that my school district had the top ten seniors in the graduating class nominate teachers who had an impact on their education. For the teachers, this nomination process was anonymous, meaning that we received letters stating that we were nominated without knowing who actually nominated us. At this time, I had kind of entered into a "funk" with my teaching where I was doing simple recycled lessons over the course of about two years. The reason for this "funk" was the sickness / passing of my Mom back in the spring of 2017. Prior to my Mom's passing, I was constantly looking for new things to try within my classroom in order to keep it fresh for me and engaging for my students. New things that I had implemented within my classroom included a bring your own device policy, self-paced, student centered learning units, genius hour, a classroom Twitter account, projects that included connecting to the world outside of our classroom, and Mystery Skypes to name a few. Once my Mom became sick, my desire, and free time needed to implement new projects like these faded and I started to recycle older, less time-consuming lessons.
As stated, spring of 2018, was my school district's inaugural year for their "Excellence in Education Awards Ceremony". I had received a letter stating that I was nominated by a former student, but knew nothing else about it since it was the first year that this ceremony was taking place. The ceremony was set to take place on a Tuesday and on the weekend before, I had received an e-mail from one of my former students who was a sophomore asking fi I would come and watch her softball game on Tuesday, the same day as the ceremony. While pleasantly surprised, I accepted her invitation and went to the game. While at the game, I ran into her brother, who I also had as a student who happened to be a senior. I spent the entire game talking to her brother about various things, with neither of us mentioning the awards ceremony later that evening. After the game was over, I also spent time talking with the girl and her mother. What was special about this girl was that she had battled a form of cancer and is currently in remission. During the time that she was undergoing treatments, I would send an encouraging card to her each week. While talking to her Mom, she told me how this girl would look forward to going out to her mailbox each week looking for the cards, and still had them in a show box under her bed.
Once we were done talking, we all said we had places to be and went our different ways. I, obviously, went to the ceremony. It wasn't until I read the event program that I realized that the brother with whom I had spent the entire game talking to was one of two seniors who had nominated me for the award. The ceremony itself proved to be a very special and memorable experience for all of us teachers who were lucky enough to be there. My experience, however, didn't stop there. That night, I received an e-mail from the senior I was talking to at the softball game who had also nominated me asking if I wanted to attend his last choir concert. His dad was out of town with work, so he had an extra ticket left and invited me to sit with his family for the concert. The concert was another memorable experience that just added to the softball game and teacher awards ceremony.
So, for me, it was more of a 'Best Week in Education' where I was lucky enough to reunite with a family of students whom I had taught five to seven years prior. After spending time with them, and listening to the brother's flattering speech at the teacher's award ceremony about how my taking risks in the classroom and trying new things inspired him to try new things as well, I was able to break out of my "funk". Since that time, I've gone back to taking risks within my classroom by trying new things such as coding, programming Sphero robots, and trying to gamify my classroom through the use of Classcraft in order to try and keep my students engaged and inspired within the learning process.
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