With most things in life that need doing, especially things like work projects, there is a clear beginning and a clear end. This past school year, our first year of teaching, felt much like that; school kicked off in August, and we needed to power through two semesters to get to summer break. By the time that break rolled around in June, coming off the heels of a school year featuring distance learning at night, a coup, and a move to the other side of the world, it felt that some time off was much deserved.
Fast forward a month and a half, and I recently had quite the realization: I wasn’t going to be able to continue lounging around Thailand permanently because the next school year is happening in two weeks! In the big picture, this is a great reminder that the teacher’s job is never done. As much as finishing the school year feels like a great accomplishment, a new group of kids to teach is waiting right around the corner. And that thought is pretty exciting! After getting a taste of teaching in my first year, getting to meet whole new classes of students and accomplishing great things together has motivated me to get my stuff together and get ready to be my best self in the 2021-22 school year.
In the smaller picture, though, a new school year is also an opportunity to take the outline of what I did the year before and make everything- the units, the lessons, the activities- better in order to reach and impact the most amount of students. Overall, I was very proud of the units and lessons I created for my classes last year. I loved using a style of teaching called “Project Based Learning” to design curriculum that was exciting, engaging, and allowed the students to learn the best that they could. But of course, things are never perfect in a classroom, and this was never clearer than with how the coup and resulting unrest in Myanmar that is continuing to this day started to affect my class. After the coup, I tried dedicating class time to allow the students to practice mindfulness and to learn about their emotions, not just geography or history. Many of them loved it, but much of the time it felt like trying to throw a band aid on an invisible wound. Therefore, my biggest goal of the next school year is to purposefully incorporate social and emotional learning into my classroom, letting the students learn about themselves and try to take care of some of the basic needs they have in life. If I can design connected units that allow them to learn and develop new skills to help them every day in life, then adding social studies knowledge will just be icing on the cake. Going into my second year of teaching, I have much more freedom to focus on this because I already have the unit plans in place that I ground out last year. Since I am able to spend less time on lesson creation, I can spend more time on this new material in the classroom.
Reflections like this are important to have at the beginning of every new school year. Because, as much as I LOVE lounging around Thailand uninterrupted, there are still big things that need doing, like the teaching of the future generation. That is what makes the endless cycle of stop-and-start-again school years so meaningful and exciting.
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