Finding the Wonderful: Teaching and Learning

This year I am job sharing. It has been amazing for all the obvious reasons, it is easier to balance my many roles (mom, wife, friend, teacher, teacher-author, etc.), but there has been an unexpected benefit from sharing a space, students, and all aspects of teaching with another person. It is what I have learned about life, teaching, and everything in between from my teaching partner Shelley (from Lolly’s Locker). 

This spectacular creation below pretty much sums up the greatest lesson I have learned from her. 

This picture, of course, does not do it justice! This banana bread is legendary. For years I heard about it and the rumor was no one’s husband or family had ever tasted it because it was gone before they got home from work. This year I finally got a loaf of heaven!

Shelley is able to take mushy “useless” bananas and make something wonderful. 

Most people tend to throw bananas away when the blackish-brown begins to overtake the yellow and they become slack and mushy. Shelley on the other hand sees the possibilities in them. Instead of sweeping them into the trash and regretting buying so many, she gets out real quality ingredients (I assume butter, flour, sugar, eggs, and something that I am pretty sure is magical), spends the time, and does the work to make this into something amazing. She does not try to “fix” the bananas, she works with them to make them into something spectacular. She sees the potential in the mushy bananas, the value and the usefulness in something that most people would dismiss.

In a world full of packaged mixes, “just add water” cooking, and microwave recipes, this bread stands out as what you can do with time, effort, and quality ingredients. 

In my early years of teaching I had a principal that said it was not the program or method you used (all  of them work or don’t work to some degree), but the passion and heart of the teacher that really makes the difference. I was fresh out of graduate school and rolled my eyes at this. Now I see that it really all comes down to this. This is what matters. 

When I come into our classroom (she teaches in the morning and I teach in the afternoon), I see kids engaged with “real ingredients”, not hollow quick fixes, or “just add kids” programs designed to help children to move “upward” on an arbitrary metric on some arbitrary scale that we have begun to pin our hopes on so much in education. She knows which children are the readers, the artists, the introverts, the athletes, or the ones that just need love at that moment. She celebrates them and takes true delight in who they really are. She can look past daily grind of teaching in a world filled with data points, curriculum maps, and targeted interventions and transform the things most of us dismiss into something wonderful! 

I am going to keep this picture of the banana bread to remember to slow down, not rely on a quick fix, and most of all find the wonderful and usefulness in the things people sometimes overlook.

Authors note: Shelley has agreed to join our Planning in Paradise blog group. She is a true fountain of knowledge of practical ways to make a classroom work and I have learned so much from her. I can not wait to read her upcoming blogs!