Compassionate Accountability: Compassionate Accountability is the sweet spot that I seek for my students. Teachers need to care about and nurture their students, but teachers should not treat students like victims, ultimately enabling and thus crippling them. So, while I treat them with compassion, I work to teach kids how to be robust and powerful, how to build voice, how to self advocate, and how to become self-reliant. They also need to build transferable skills and advance their cultural literacy. Life takes fortitude, hard work, courage, and a dedication to contributing more than one consumes. My job is to assist my students on their journey toward those goals.
Always, always, always, no matter what, keep up with the syllabus.
Always have your reading done for each day.
This includes the days after you have been absent, after snow days, or after a suspension.
The classroom is no longer an isolated place where discrete knowledge is passed from teacher to student. Today’s classroom is a complex environment where an overwhelming abundance of constantly-changing (and often conflicting) content from around the world (and beyond) is judged for validity, organized, measured, compared, adapted, synthesized, and then used to initiate and develop new ideas. This content can be imported into the classroom in real time and is managed (read, written and/or spoken about) with an always-evolving student skill set. And then new ideas are published with the world without leaving the room. This new paradigm requires entirely new skills, behaviors, ways of thinking, activities, assignments, technologies, and ethics. I am doing my best to prepare kids for a world that I can barely imagine.
