essay

One of my favorite characters in all literary history, Anne Shirley once said, “Each day is always fresh with no mistakes.” As I experience teaching for the first time, I have been surprised to see that these wise words apply not only to my life as a teacher, but to the lives of my students. I have high expectations for myself and at times, I forget that I am still a learner. One day, I was very excited about my lesson on Walden where I was going to break my students up into groups. They were going to read and teach the class what they learned. Unfortunately the students weren’t able to understand Walden as well as I thought they would. They tried to explain the section they had read to the class, but they couldn’t. I had given them wings before they were quite ready, so I slow down and show them how to read such a piece on their own. Even as a seasoned teacher, I know that there will be days when my lessons will not go quite as I planned, or days when I am not as patient or kind as I should be. This is when I am reminded that tomorrow will come. I will have yet another chance to make things right, to try something new, and to do things better than I did today. Each day I will improve because I have the courage to embrace what is given: a fresh start.
I have learned to allow the same opportunity for my students. I am not the only one who deserves a second chance, or three hundred and sixty five chances, for that matter. My students also are given the liberty of a future free to make mistakes. A teacher does not have the time to hold a grudge. The popular phrase “turn the other cheek” comes to mind, but in a way teacher’s cheeks turn limitlessly. If teachers do not exhibit this forgiveness, they will handicap their students by not allowing them a bad day or not allowing them to work past their prior experiences with a given subject matter. This past semester, one of my students advised me to give up on a classmate of theirs because “everybody else already had.” This attitude shocked me but caused me to realize that some children think they have run out of chances. If we expect failure, why are we surprised when it occurs? By giving students a chance to learn from their mistakes, we communicate that though we know they have failed in the past, we are eagerly anticipating the day when they succeed.
Based on all I have learned, I would encourage beginning teachers to allow themselves to have bad days and to allow for failures. They are unavoidable; we might as well embrace them because through these we will learn more than any success that we might have. Likewise I would encourage them to allow for their students to have bad days. It is too easy to write a child off, to assume that what we have heard about them is true, or to send them to ISS so they’re not our problem anymore. I am not saying that there is no room for discipline, but that it is also right to give students opportunities to prove themselves. We must offer our students the knowledge that we believe that even though they have been rude to us or have not been the best student in the past, we know that they are capable of success in our classroom.
Each day is full of mistakes, and we shall be limitless learners as we redeem our failures.