If you love teaching, learning new things and bringing creativity and engagement into your classroom, then you're an ever growing educator, too. HI! 👋🏻
my students accidentally invented a subject
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I’ve been seeing this a lot on my feed these days: Definitely been feeling this, too - I’ve been meaning to email all month... and it’s just been a holiday for the past few weeks 🙂 Now that Tishrei is behind us and school is fully back, I’ve been thinking about my own personal “V’Yaakov Holach L’darko” I was listening to a podcast with Carol Dweck, and she was remembering how her middle school classroom was arranged based on perceived intelligence! Imagine having your seat determined by your test scores! I once had a guest over who told me that her principal returned tests from highest to lowest received score. And I remembered what the Lulav teaches us. I love it and think of it each year. 4 species. 4 kinds of Jews. And yet, the mitzvah is not about honoring the Esrog, the best of us. It’s about taking these four unique plants and bringing them together. If even the Aravah (willow), the least impressive, were missing - the mitzvah is incomplete. There’s the academic one who loves to help other students in the class, the one who loves to help but may not be the most learned, the one who hates school and says they hate people. ​ We bring them all together in our classroom. That’s the power of a good teacher. PS: On that note, do you have students who finish their work early? I created these independent Haftorah sheets exactly for students like that! Fun fact: my students loved them so much, they asked me to turn it into a subject so that everyone gets to learn it, not just the early finishers. I love those kids ♡ Mushkie |
Evergrowing Educator
If you love teaching, learning new things and bringing creativity and engagement into your classroom, then you're an ever growing educator, too. HI! 👋🏻
"What did you do over break?” Sounds like such an innocent question, right? It seems like it's a great way to reflect on vacation and have students share. But there's a student who might be waiting for the ground to swallow them when you ask this. A teacher once told me that every year, knowing her mother was sick and her family could not afford trips, she would calculate when it would be her turn to share about her break. As the moment got close, she would raise her hand, rush to the...
(Scroll down for the NEW monthly teacher planner!)There’s this joke I’ve told my students: There was a man who loved archery. He was always looking for new tips and tricks. One day, he was walking through a forest and saw a house with bullseyes everywhere. Dead center. Every. Single. One. He knocked on the door and asked the man who lived there, “How do you do it? I’ve never seen aim like that.”The man smiled and said, “Oh, it’s easy. First I stick the arrow in the wall. Then I draw the...
“Can you put us into chatgpt and turn us into lego people?” my kids, huge lego fans, asked me.I explained to them why I wouldn’t do that. Anything uploaded to ChatGPT is stored on OpenAI’s servers and I wouldn’t upload photos of kids (or my students!) to ChatGPT! It did spark an idea though. A few months later, I took out a large canvas and pencil and I outlined lego people, one for each person in our family. Each kid then painted themselves, with their favorite outfit choice, their faces,...