A tribute to education

I'll just flat out say it: I'm proud to be a teacher. I love working with students and helping them achieve their potential. I'm a strong believer in the power of education. Where would we be without it? Recently, my grandmother passed away. She was born in 1920, and became a nurse in the 1940's. She chose to make nursing a profession even after she was married and was raising a family. Education was key to her success. Her early education built the foundation she needed to be successful in high school. High school taught her more specialized instruction, but it also reinforced the benefits of hard work and dedication to one's goals. Grandma decided she wanted to graduate with as many credits as possible. She made it, graduating with 20 credits instead of the 16 required in her day. As she pursued her nursing degree, she worked long hours and for a time actually lived at the hospital, rotating between classes and intern shifts. Her hard work paid off when she graduated, leading to a distinguished career of serving patients and teaching others about nursing throughout her life.

This story of my grandma acts as a tribute to the benefits of education. Through her efforts, she was able to achieve her goal of becoming a nurse. Because of her efforts, she helped countless people throughout her career, both through the nature of her work and through the example that she set. My firm belief in the value of education can be traced to my Grandma, and other fine examples like her. I know as a teacher I have the ability to profoundly affect people's lives, which is a responsibility I do not take lightly. I am pursuing my administrative endorsement in an effort to help other teachers inspire their students in a similar way. Education is a gift we can earn that we are obligated to share. Thanks grandma.

Midterms and Parent Teacher Conferences

At UTVA, we work on a semester schedule. We're almost to midterms, which means it's almost time for our parent teacher conferences. These conferences are a little different, as you may imagine, since we don't have a physical classroom that parents can visit. The teachers of UTVA are not all lined up in the gym for a few hours, as is often the case in a traditional brick and mortar school. Instead, we arrange appointments with parents and their students to visit us in our online classroom. Once there, we visit about progress, go over missing work, sing praises of improvements, and make some goals for the remainder of the semester. It is a refreshing opportunity to discuss students individually and really help them make the most of their time in school.
Of course, there are frustrations. Not all parents are aware of their student's progress, even though they have access to grades 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In addition, at our school, students are 'going to school' at home, so parents have the opportunity (and I dare say, obligation) to check in with their student each day. Since students are not coming to a physical site for school, we at UTVA rely on parents to act as learning coaches for their students. Learning coaches are to mentor their student, act as a liaison for their student as needed, and act as a daily check point to make sure their student is progressing as expected. I'm really excited that this year we are doing more to support our learning coaches. Hopefully this effort will pay off in helping students achieve academic growth. It is from frustrations that new ideas are generated, and that ultimately leads to improvement.

Back to Basics

Our school is growing at an astounding rate. We started three years ago with less than 500 students, and this year our enrollment is 2,050. Incredible, by any standard. Our school has faced an interesting challenge to appropriately serve students by striving to keep up with demand. We hire new teachers, and find that even more are needed. In this growth process, teachers have been asked to take on new responsibilities and step up into leadership roles to help new staff as they come on board.

I find myself at a point this year where I need to refocus my efforts to the task at hand, which is helping students achieve success. In order to do this, I need to fulfill my duties as teacher and advisor while stepping up to support new teachers as they learn the ropes. By doing my best to maintain a positive outlook, I will be better able to accomplish these goals.

I know this post is a bit reflective, but most teachers will relate to the feeling of getting caught in the whirlwind of tasks. It's what happens. I'm learning with more and more certainty that it is the way in which we handle the tasks or manage the chaos that has the greatest effect on our success.