Room to Breathe

We, the teachers, are now required to post our learning objectives on the board each day. The objective ranges from the kid friendly ("Students will understand today's story") to sophisticated ("Students will identify and support the recurring theme in two different works with sufficient amount of textual evidence"). When I walked into one teacher's classroom, I noticed her learning objective dove straight to the point and said, "BE QUIET AND STAY ON TASK".

I'm hard on the kids. I'm insulted when I see them lazily twirling around pages of book that took me ages to deem as challenging yet understandable. But micromanaging and hovering above their shoulders makes them into well, prisoners. So today, I sat at my desk, and announced, "I'm here and happy to help you if you need it, but you know what you need to get done today, so take care of business".

I tore my eyes away from the corner kids (the 4 kids placed strategically at each corner of the room and heavily buffered by the nicest kids) who, true to form, weren't doing anything. I shut out the giggles and hushed whispers that swirled around the air like buzzing flies. And then, a miracle occurred.

After the last twittering laugher died out, they got to work. I dared to look up and my heart swelled with pride as I saw 90% of the class bent over their books. They even asked questions that I was burning to answer even before they cared to ask. After showing them how to properly copy a quote from the book only because they wanted to know, Samantha actually thanked me. She thanked me for teaching her. That nearly killed me.