Prepping my heart and mind for the upcoming school year

I am a week out from heading back to school/work. This will be my seventh year as an elementary special education teacher. Prior to that, I homeschooled our children for 11 years. I had a few years in between the two when I continued to teach piano (I had done so throughout the homeschooling years) and was deciding which direction my future would take. Fairly quickly (that’s a story in itself) I decided to go back to school to get my masters degree in Special Education. 

When I was homeschooling, I would spend the summer months reading and researching to find the best instructional material, techniques, etc. By mid-August, I was excited and ready to jump into another year. I loved my children and wanted nothing but the best for them. And when I began teaching in the public school system, much the same occurred during the summer months—-research, learn, plan, etc. and anxiously await the reunion and new learning adventures with my students.

Sadly, since Covid-19 upended everything, my perspective has been somewhat askew. Last summer we teachers were all just ready for a break from the major stress of having to learn to teach through a computer screen, and the upcoming school year loomed with questions and anxieties of the unknown. Well, we survived. The constant starts, stops, and shifts throughout the year made for quite a challenging year, but at least the initial hard learning curve helped to prepare us. 

So, here we are facing a new year, with many of the same unknowns looming. Will the delta variant continue to infect children? Will we have to revert to hybrid or remote learning? In June, we were told that there would be no distant learning in the fall, and so far that appears to hold. Yet, no one can know for sure if that will need to change. 

And so, here I am with lots of unanswerable questions and a fair amount of unease. I sit here asking myself this question—What will be my anchoring thoughts and attitudes as I head into the unknown? Here are a few things that come to mind:

1) Focus on the students. They need extra love, patience, and understanding as they will likely have a lot of fears and uncertainties, just like all of us. 

2) Move through each day with gentleness.

3) Incorporate as much of the natural world in my instruction as possible. Nature is healing, and many of these kids don’t get nearly enough interaction with nature. (**I’ve learned that this is not always easy. My instruction is often highly targeted and my time is limited with my students. Yet…I’ve seen firsthand that nature sparks interest and brings learning to life.

As I read back over these points, I have to laugh. These are the guiding principles that I’ve been trying to follow all along. I just needed to write them out and remind myself going in that loving and helping the kids to the best of my ability is why I do what I do. 

Yes, there’s a lot of research that I’ve had to dig into in order to really understand my students—how they learn, what their specific challenges are, what lies behind challenging behaviors, etc…and how best to address these things, both from an instructional and social/emotional perspective. YET, loving them and doing my very best for them on a daily basis is what it’s all about.