Valentine's Day - How to Save a Life - Be a teacher

Valentine's Day 

Love Day

Dedicated to my fellow teachers

Who love their students every day

We are it

We have dedicated our lives to it

We are everything with it

Nothing without it

Because we have become it

Completely vulnerable to it

Love

Is so incredibly wonderful

And the longer we stay in our profession

The more we dive completely into it

~ Adam Stuart

Valentine's Day 2016

*Inspired after receiving an email recently from a parent of a former student (It is not the student pictured below. This was Joadeliz's gift to me this year that she spent her own money on; money she has very little of. It was truly a gift from her heart).

"Dear Mr. Stuart,

________ has mentioned you several times in the past few months. I as her mom am reaching out to you in hopes that you can send her your famous words of encouragement. 

She has been diagnosed with the early onset of ______ 

She has several doctors appointments in the upcoming weeks. She feels down about school, (___A's, ___B's), she needs an uplifting message and trust me I know you're the one that can deliver it and she would openly  receive it.

Once again,  I deeply appreciate it, if you can do that with your busy schedule."

I am a very unassuming person, which means I don't have an ego thinking I'm great, or worried about others seeing me as great or being better than anybody. I simply see the best in others and in the world and often have no idea of any impact I'm having on others. 

Just like any teacher, I do what I do because I am what I am and because it feels real and it feels true.

While moving recently I found a cross a student gave me ten years ago who contacts me now when she feels like cutting herself.

I have worn that cross around my neck every day since finding it.

I also found a letter from another student who told me he had gone through a period of wanting to kill himself, but each time he tried he heard my voice telling him and his classmates to Dream Big, Do Big, and never give up until they Became Big, and if any of them ever did give up they could always come back to me for hope and passion and the strength to fight again because the world needed them and the gifts only they could develop and give to the world.

He is now an incredible poet.

  

More and more of us are feeling so stressed out by stressed out administrators stressed out by their bosses over-stressing their jobs are at stake by the new protocol that we all forget why we do what we do and don't want to do it anymore.

And more and more of use are dropping out of teaching forever, wondering where we went wrong in our lives.

I came within one day from quitting teaching this year. I was still broken-hearted from a relationship that had ended months earlier, having lost my best friend and wondering where everything had gone wrong.

And now I was teaching at a new school with even tougher requirements because it was a failing school. I didn't feel strong. I didn't feel confident. And I felt so stressed out in meetings that all I heard in my head was, "You can't do this anymore." 


And I wondered what a grown man was doing teaching a bunch of kids who didn't do their homework, didn't behave, didn't care. 


I felt like a loser wondering again where I had gone wrong.

Then I reached down, deep down, into the only thing I had. The only thing I was and the only thing I was ever good at. Love. 

And I didn't quit.

I showed up one day at a time and gave all of me for just one more day at a time.  I decided to live again and love again every day I could get myself out of bed again.

I say we don't drop out. Things are tough in teaching. They are overwhelming. They are hard. 

Love is tougher. Love overcomes. Love breaks down all obstacles.

"It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres." (Corinthians)

And the love we have for our students has an effect we often have no idea just how big it is on them, how long it stays with them, and how long it keeps them alive because it has become a part of them.  

Valentine's Day is our day.

It is our day every day.

Happy Valentine's Day teachers!

I love you for what you do.

True Teaching Collaboration in Action

Teach Thought 30 Day Challenge ~ Day 7 ~ Who is or was your most inspirational colleague?

Today is actually Day 12 of the 30 Day Challenge, but due to moving into a new apartment this weekend and an aggravated health concern that has moved my surgery up to this Tuesday I've gotten behind. It is my intention before Tuesday to catch up!

As promised from Day 6's blog, here is the picture Robin Williams sent me. 

His role in Dead Poet's Society is what made me want to leave the riches of the business world and enter the world of education to enrich others as he did in the movie. 

I owe him a lot and dedicate my these blogs to him. I hope to contact his wife some day and let her know how much Robin touched my life and continues to touch the lives of my students year after year. 

The colleague who has inspired me the most is our art teacher here at Sand Lake Elementary, Beth Elliston.  

She cares so much for her students that she transforms her room each year to create an experience they will never forget. One year it was a giant iPad, the next the Tardis from the British show Doctor Who, and this year it's Sherlock Holmes from the BBC. 

I've never seen a specials teacher more committed to creating an entire experience that leads to a huge increase in learning. Before her an art teacher was just an art teacher. Now an art teacher is a developer of the mind. 

Secondly, she is an amazing collaborator. She helped me transform my room into the famous art museum in Paris, the Louvre, where students spent the year transforming themselves into masterpieces. The next year she encouraged me to transform my room into a giant ship where my students travelled and explored the world of knowledge. This year it's a TV studio with a Tardis where we are time-travelling scientists using reading and math skills to interview famous people while we navigate the past, present and future. 

Yet she didn't stop there. She would ask me and other teachers what standards we were teaching and spend hours figuring out how to integrate them into her art lessons. 

More than once I and the other "regular teachers" would hear our students make connections to the big ideas of reading, science or math that we were teaching. When we asked with pride, "You remember that from when we went over it in class?" we heard, "No, I learned it in art class".

It's true what Marzano says about multiple exposures being needed for knowledge to truly take hold in the mind. 

Because of this we are truly lucky to have her teaching the way she does in our school. 

Through her caring, creativity and collaboration, Beth Elliston has not only taken teaching art out of the dark ages, but helped me take my own teaching own teaching farther than I've ever been able to on my own.