Tag Archives: teachers

Nov18

National Education Week

Posted on November 18, 2013 by daunaeasley

Celebrate National Education Week now! November 18-22 is National Education Week. I personally have many reasons to celebrate. I think it is particularly appropriate that this week is so close to the Thanksgiving holiday. This educator has many things for which to be grateful. How about you?

I’m grateful that a wonderful teacher, Esther Waggoner taught with so much enthusiasm when I was in the third grade, that she made me want to grow up and join the teaching profession. Thank you Mrs. Waggoner from the Mason, Ohio school district.
I’m grateful that at age eight I chose the right profession for myself. What are the chances of that happening?
I’m grateful that so many of my former students honor my relationships that I built with them by staying in touch with me. What joy that adds to my life.
I’m grateful that my teaching path had its twists and turns that gave me such rich experiences. I never dreamed at the outset of my career that I would teach preschool, every elementary grade, high school and now work with college students. What a blessing this rich variety has been.
I’m grateful for the creativity a teacher can bring to the classroom. Great teaching is an art form and the classroom can be enriched by it.
I’m grateful that a favorite high school band, the Lakota West Marching Firebirds of West Chester, Ohio, will be marching in the Macy’s Day parade on television this Thanksgiving Day. Watch for them! They are not pictured above. All the photos on their website seemed to be copyrighted. However, watch for their red and white uniforms and their great sound.

Teachers March Together

However there are some things about the teaching profession that currently sadden me.

It saddens me that it seems to be so accepted to widely criticize the teaching profession in today’s media.
It saddens me that it seems so acceptable to vote against levies for education and our kids’ needs.
It is my dream that all the great teachers in the profession (and there hundreds of thousands of them) will work hard to reestablish the reputation of professionalism in this teaching profession that I love so much.
We do this by focusing on the students’ needs and their families.
We do this with commitment to our profession. Through our thorough preparation and creativity in our daily lessons we can re-create a respect for teachers.
We can’t capitulate to the single-minded obsession about test scores. We need to speak calmly and with reason until our voices are heard. Great teaching is so much more than testing. Yes, you heard me. Great teaching > test scores. Some of our hardest working and most committed teachers are being maligned because they are committed to working with a student population who are at-risk learners. That makes no sense.
We need to teach our students lessons about living life successfully in addition to the academics we teach. They need to learn about the value of risk taking, recovering from failures, thinking outside the box and the power of persistence. Some of our country’s greatest success stories were the brainchild of former students who didn’t test well.
We became teachers to change lives.

TEACH…To Change Lives

Available autographed or in large quantities from the author: dauna@cinci.rr.com

Also available at Amazon.com

Contact Dauna Easley to speak to your group: dauna@cinci.rr.com

Apr8

Helping Students Create Their Own Destiny

Posted on April 8, 2013 by daunaeasley

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YOU Create Your Own Destiny

“Between stimulus and response there is a space.

In that space is our power to choose our response.

In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

-Viktor E. Frankl

These words have always inspired me. Written by a man who survived the concentration camps of the holocaust makes them even more significant. We cannot control many of the things that happen to us in life; but we have absolute control over the ways we respond to those events.

One of our greatest roles as teachers, is to teach truths about life. Sure, we are hired to teach our academic areas; but I believe we miss one of our most important choices if we don’t also teach underlying truths that help our students live a successful life. This quote helped me come up with a way to teach students that they have the power to create their own destiny. How did I do that?

Early in the school year, I put a dot or a star on the far left margin of the chalk board. (Think wipe-off board or electronic board these days). Then I would move to the farthest right side of the board and make another dot or star.

I would pause until they seemed interested in what I was doing. You can do a lot of teaching in the pauses. Once they seemed quiet and curious I would say as I pointed…

This dot on the left side of the board represents the things that happen to us as we live our lives.

Pause

Sometimes those events are terrible. Someone we love rejects us.

(Teens always are interested in matters of the heart).

Pause

Sometimes we work hard toward a goal and yet we get passed over. Someone else gets recognition that we deserve. We lose our jobs. A loved one dies. Someone insults you or passes around untrue gossip about you. Someone steals something from you. Someone hurts you deeply.

(Each time I offer one of these scenarios I once again point to the star or dot on the left side of the board). I sometimes ask them to add bad things that might happen in life.

Then I move to slowly the left side of the board and point to the dot on the far right.

Way, way over here on the far right side of the board is the way you respond to those events.

Pause

Do you know what is between these two dots?

Usually they just look at me and wait. Sometimes someone will make a joke and say, “Nothing?”

Pause

The only thing that lies between an event and what you do to respond to that event, is your choice. No matter what happens to us, we always, always, have control over the way we respond to it.

We need to remember only we have the choice to decide how we respond. We always choose. It is those choices that determine our destiny. Look carefully. What is between those two dots?

I then v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y draw a wavy line between those two dots on opposite ends of the board.

You have allllllll this time between the two dots, between the event and your response to decide how you are going to respond.

Choosing the way you will respond, making the choice creates your destiny. What happens to you, doesn’t create your destiny. Your choices in the way you react create your destiny.

Teens (and some adults) limit their destiny when they react without thinking…without making a choice. They say things like, “Well, he pushed me so I punched him,” or “When she looked at me like that I just had to tell her off.”

Wrong. Your reaction was a choice.

Teens will tell me that their parents or buddies told them never to let people treat you like that.

Look around you. Are the people who give you this “punch-them-in-the-face” advice… are they themselves a success in life? Are they living a life you want to emulate? Well, are they?

Or are they in prison or holding entry-level jobs or no jobs even though they are middle age?

You create your own destiny by the choices you make between any stimulus and the response you choose.

Let’s be honest, sometime in life we’ve all made a mistake with a knee-jerk reaction to a situation. I know I have. But I later regretted my response. I share a couple of examples of my own mistakes with my students. We can teach quite a bit by sharing our failures and vulnerabilities. They hear us best when we aren’t preaching.

As the year progresses and a teen or two will invariably make a poor choice, I don’t have to say anything. I just go to the board, make my two dots, and draw the wavy line in between. No words have to be spoken, though many of the students will give that little hum (or groan) of understanding.

I find it’s best to do this activity early in the year before a poor choice has occurred. That way no student is made the target of the exercise. When students come into class all excited about a fight that has just occurred in the cafeteria or hallway, I just draw my two dots and that slow wavy line in between. They get it. They may say something like, “No, seriously Mrs. E. you should have seen it, it was so cool.” But I just draw my two dots and my wavy line again.

What is My Hope?

Someday when I’m no longer standing in front of them in a classroom, my students will remember the two dots and the long wavy line between them. They will realize that they have the power to create their own destiny with the choices they make. They won’t feel they have to become the victim of their own poor choices even if lousy choices were all that was modeled for them.

When I move outside the sometimes confining limits of my academic area, I often feel like I’m doing my most important teaching. It is when I most feel like I am teaching to change lives.

TEACH…To Change Lives

Available autographed or in large quantities from the author: dauna@cinci.rr.com

Also available at Amazon.com

Feb11

Conversations About our Schools

Posted on February 11, 2013 by daunaeasley

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True Stories from My Past Week

Story # 1

I was visiting an elementary school this past week observing a college senior who is student teaching this semester. As I left her classroom I was walking through the school hallway alone. A kindergarten boy came running down the hallway on his way to the bathroom. He was close to me before he noticed me.

He stopped running when he saw me, looked me up and down and said, “What school did YOU go to last year?”

I laughed all the way home about his comment.

Moving Teachers

Story #2

On Saturday I visited a school district 45 minutes away to watch my granddaughter perform in a competition. There was a lady I had never met before sitting behind me. She began talking about her past week as a kindergarten teacher. Once I realized she was a kindergarten teacher, I turned around to tell her my story about the little boy in the hallway. She listened and laughed. When she realized I was also in the teaching profession she then said, “Let me tell you about my week at school.

“On Thursday of this week the administrators called a previously unannounced teachers’ meeting. We found out at that meeting almost all of the third through sixth grade teachers will be leaving our urban school. They are getting rid of all but two teachers in those grades because the students’ test scores came back too low. The only reason we kindergarten through second grade teachers still have jobs is because our students don’t yet take the standardized tests.”

I was stunned. “Are they firing all those teachers?” I asked.

She continued her tale, “No, they are moving them to another school in our district. The other school is in a completely different neighborhood with an entirely different clientele. Guess what? Not so surprisingly their tests scores are higher. Therefore the administrators (or somebody) believes those teachers are more effective. They are bringing those ‘effective’ teachers to our school to boost our students’ test scores. They are moving what they consider our ineffective teachers to the other school to learn from the ‘effective’ teachers still there.”

We smiled at each other and shook our heads.

I thought to myself, “Who is making these decisions? Did they visit in both those schools? What are educators even thinking? Or are educators even involved in any of these decisions?” Like the kindergarten boy I met in the hallway I wondered, “What school did THEY go to last year?”

Value Added

Story #3

On Sunday I was in another school watching yet another grandchild participate in a function. Next to me sat a wonderful, committed first year teacher. I have known this young lady for years and am very aware of her standard of excellence. I told her the story the kindergarten teacher shared with me. She was disappointed, but not surprised.

She described a similar circumstance she had encountered. School districts have become so reactionary to test scores that it seems like learning takes a back seat to the almighty score. Everyone is talking about value added.

Note from me: When schools talk about ‘value added’ these days they only mean how did you raise test scores? They don’t mean how well do you communicate with parents, differentiate instruction, tutor or counsel students. Value added means only, “What did you do to raise test scores on the standardized tests?” I’m sad about that. A valuable teacher is so much more than one number on a page. Ask any student what constitutes a valuable teacher. They will describe one accurately. But students’ opinions don’t factor into the equation either. Only standardized test scores matter anymore.

This young teacher pointed out that her subject (foreign language) isn’t covered on the state standardized test. But the teachers still have to prove ‘value added’. Essentially all they have to do is make up a pre-test, then teach the skill and administer their own post test. If the scores go up, they can prove value has been added. She is professional enough and committed enough to recognize the irony in this scenario and she is only a first year teacher.

Isn’t this just a little like asking the fox to guard the chicken coop?

It makes me sad to see educators running in circles like this. The cry for higher test scores from politicians and the media….higher test scores, no matter what the method… is causing otherwise intelligent people to make some pretty desperate decisions. When we don’t know what to do, we just get forced into doing something whether it is worthwhile or not.

I want to ask the politicians, government officials and reporters who are complaining about our schools…in the words of a kindergarten boy…

What schools did you go to last year?

What teachers did you interview? Did you ask them how to raise test scores?

What did students suggest about how to identify effective teachers and raise test scores?

TEACH…To Change Lives

Autographed books and large quatities available from the author: dauna @cinci.rr.com

Also available at Amazon.com