First Day Wow!

Today was the first day of school for us. All-in-all, it was a great day for me. I love my family and I love my coworkers, but I always look forward to the first day back with kids. Today began my 18th year teaching and I realized a long time ago, this is my calling. It's what I'm supposed to do. There were a lot of great things to say about today, but I'm going to focus on one -- what I learned from our social contracts.

What is a social contract you might ask?

To some it sounds crazy. To others silly. Some think it's stupid. But a few...a few of them took it serious and used it for its intended purpose -- to give kids a voice in the standard operating procedures of the classroom. 

Kids were supposed to brainstorm and come up with suggestions for rules, policies, and procedures framed around four essential questions

1. How do you want to be treated by the teacher?
2. How do you want to be treated by others?
3. How do you think the teacher wants to be treated?
4. How do we want to be treated when there is conflict?

We had to do this in every class. By the end of the day, most students told me it was getting old. Several said it was the same thing, the same things, the same words, the same rules popping up in every class. Over and over again. 

When I read the responses, I saw what they meant, as most of them were pretty generic and to be expected. There were several good ones, but a couple of suggestions really stood out and I'm convinced that if I'd only gotten those two responses and everyone else ignored it and refused to participate, the entire exercise would still have been worth it. 

• "Make sure that you are giving people time to ask their questions, even if you think they are asking something stupid."
• "I want to be treated as having potential."

Boy! These two really hit me in the gut! Even though I don't think I'm guilty of either of these, just reading these responses lets me know that whoever wrote this has, at some point in the past, felt that a teacher or teachers shut them down because the teacher(s) thought they were asking something stupid. At least one of my students at some point in the past felt like a teacher or teachers treated them as though they had no potential. 

I've been telling my coworkers of four goals I have for this year. I won't list them here because they're part of an inside joke. But I'm now adding two goals for this year after this social contract exercise today. 1) Never make a student feel like I think their question is stupid, and 2) tell them over and over and over again that they are capable of accomplishing great things, and interacting with them in a way that lets them know I really believe that. 

There were a lot of other great things happening today, but it would take a book to describe them all. I have no doubt my awesome students will give me many more great stories to write in the next 10 months.