A proud teacher moment...

Today, at school, I tried a bit of an experiment with my students. While my role as a special education teacher is truly to focus on math and reading skills, since it is the first full week, my purpose has truly been to get to know the kiddos and to build a relationship with them. That being said, when I think back to my middle school teachers (...decades ago... how did that happen?) I can remember having a healthy fear of their authority. If I ever knew anything personal about them (i.e. if they had kids, pets, etc.) it was because my mum was a teacher in the district and had hand-picked my teachers for me. There was already the foundation of a relationship there, so I didn't really need to get to know my teachers at school.

In my classroom, I discovered over the last few days that truly letting my students grill me has opened quite a few doors. While I refuse to tell them how old I am (they all think I'm 25... I'll take it), we've developed a great rapport and have discussed things like favourite foods, colours, books, and movies. Those things bridged over to discussions about family members and vacations and since we're in the honeymoon phase, I decided today to dig in a bit to examine my students' ethical standpoints on things.

I made signs that said "Agree" and "Disagree" and hung them on opposite sides of the room. I then made statements and had students silently move to the side of the room with the sign that supported their opinions. Then, we were able to open things up for debate.

It was really fun to see where students agreed and had differences of opinions, but the statements that sparked the most discussions were:

"It is ok to keep animals in zoos" and "It is ok to litter."

I could have cried. Of all 15 statements that I read to them, the two aforementioned statements were the most wonderful conversation starters. One class even got into a debate about the litter statement, because out of everyone, one person said it was ok to litter. I kid you not, the remainder of the class presented her with a number of arguments about why littering was bad and eventually won her over!

It was a really proud moment for me to see that my loves of teaching and of the environment overlapped (and also helped me to see that my kiddos have a genuine interest in environmental matters... so I can use that to help teach reading and math throughout the year)!

Yay!