There are many reasons why I am
glad that I chose to be a teacher.
Teaching is certainly not an easy job, but it is a rewarding one. You get to watch your students grow on a
daily basis. You get to see their
excitement as they achieve a new goal or discover a new tidbit of knowledge. You get to enjoy the pleasure of knowing that
every day their lives are touched by you, influenced by you, and hopefully made
better by you. And you get to laugh with
them. Kids love to laugh, and they’re
really good at it.
With
teaching, every day is a new day with new experiences and surprises. You have to be 100% engaged in what you are
doing every moment those children are in your classroom and you have to know
how to keep those 25 odd children calm and productive for 6-7 hours a day. In the teaching world, we call this good “classroom
management.” Some may disagree with me
here, but I believe that the qualities necessary to be a good teacher are the same
qualities necessary to be a good dog owner.
I wanted to
be a great dog owner. I had an image of
the kind of dog I wanted Lucy to be. One
who was social and friendly with dogs and people, one who could travel with me
to a friend’s house, or go camping with me on the weekends (not that I ever
went camping). I wanted a dog who was a good walker—no pulling
on the leash or barking at other dogs. And
I realized that if I wanted those things, I had a lot of work to do. I started watching rerun marathons of the Dog
Whisperer. I had a DVR at the time, and
any time the Dog Whisperer played on any station, it was recorded. This was at the height of Caesar Milan’s
fame, so it was ALWAYS on. I got to the
point that I had to sift through all the recordings to see which ones I hadn’t
seen yet. I bought Caesar’s book and
read it in a matter of days. Caesar
became my new best friend. I thought his
theory about dogs made a lot of sense.
If you believe you are in charge, they will believe you are too. The same idea applies to 6-year-olds.
To be a good teacher, you have to
be consistent. Kids need to know what to
expect from you, when to expect it, and they need to be able to trust that they
will get what they expect. This is how
they learn to trust you. You need to be
consistent with your expectations as well.
If you expect them to sit quietly during a lesson, you need to expect
that during every lesson. You can’t let
anything slide for anyone. To train a
dog well, you need to be just as consistent.
You can’t yell at her one day for getting on the couch, and then the
next day think that it’s cute. Puppies
are cute…really cute. When they do
things that may seem cute at the time, like putting paws up on the table, you
have to imagine how cute that will look when the dog is 75 lbs.
To be a good teacher, you also have
to be persistent. If you teach a lesson,
and the kids just don’t get it, that doesn’t mean you give up. You teach it again in a different way. And you keep trying and trying until you find
something that works. When you’re
training a dog, you can’t give up the first time she decides she won’t come
when called. If she doesn’t come, you
figure out a way to make her come. If
there is even one time you ask her to come and then don’t follow through, then
for the rest of your life she’ll be thinking “well maybe this time she doesn’t
really mean it.”
You also have to possess 2
qualities that may seem to contradict one another. You need to be firm and positive. Kids need to know that when you ask them to
do something, they need to do it. And
then when they do it, you have to get excited.
REALLY excited. Or else they won’t
do it again. Both dogs and kids seem to
feed off of our energy. If I am really
excited about observing rocks (which is a lesson I was required to teach
recently), then the kids are really excited about rocks too. Teaching is an acting job. The kids play off your emotions. Dogs do too.
If you are excited that they went and got that ball and brought it back
to you instead of running around in circles to play chase, they might be too.
I am in no way claiming that I am
the perfect dog owner or the perfect teacher.
I’m not and I don’t believe either of those people exists. What I can say, is that over the years I’ve
learned a lot and I’ve tried my best. As
difficult as it was time-wise, I think it was kind of fate that Lucy came into
my life right at the start my first year of teaching. I picked Lucy up from the dog shelter
literally 2 weeks before I stepped foot in my first classroom full of 1st
graders. At the same time I was learning
how to manage my classroom, I was learning how to manage my dog. I’d never trained a puppy on my own before,
and I most certainly had never taught 20 first graders before. Neither of these things was easy.
I like to look back now and say I
did a pretty good job teaching both my students and my dog that year, but in
truth I was fumbling around in the dark with my eyes closed. In college, you read books and teachers tell
you about how to be a good teacher. When
I got Lucy, I listened to Caesar Milan and read his book telling me how to be a
good dog owner. People can tell you
things and you can read about things, but it’s impossible to really know what to
expect until you experience it yourself.
Until you’re in the thick of it.
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