The young girl began walking across the yard from the car, carrying a bag of potatoes almost half her size.  Wearing a summer dress and sandals, she must have hit a little hole in the yard which caused her to trip and fall, dropping the bag.  I stopped on the sidewalk beside her and asked if she was ok, but almost before it was out of my mouth, the girl said “I’m fine”.  She picked up the bag and continued into the house.  I barely noticed the little boy following her from the car until he looked up with a big smile and said “Hi Mrs. Bush!”.  I stopped and looked at him, not remembering his name but remembering his face from the school open house the night before.  “Hi!  Are you excited about school next week?”.  “Yes!” he said with an even bigger smile.  “Well, I’ll see you then!”.  I’m not sure who felt better about the encounter, me or my new student.

The open house was a ball, little ones coming to the music room as part of a scavenger hunt, checking out the instruments, sometimes running over to touch them.  Sometimes I took the nervous ones to check out all the cool stuff in my cabinets, listening for that little excited intake of breath, my job to get them excited about coming to class next week.  A week full of never ending meetings all made worth it by seeing the excited five year old faces.  Older students walked in, checking out the changes that had been made, some of them bewildered, some of them not sure, checking me out as well and obviously wondering if I would be as good as their previous teacher.  Replacing a beloved teacher is tough – I know that.  I would have felt the same way if one of my favorite teachers left and some old lady replaced them.  I will remember that and hope they give me a chance. 

It seems there are a lot of people discouraged about education today.  This isn’t limited to those outside of education, some within the profession are discouraged as well.  We’re trying to take an idea from the industrial revolution and adapt it to today without making too many big changes that would disturb the status quo. Change is hard, but forgive me, that’s a half assed way to do things.  It’s like so many things we do today – what is the cheapest, least intrusive way to make a little change instead of starting from scratch and doing things right? There are all kinds of stakeholders who want a say as to what and how students learn, from parents to educators to higher education, corporate America and politicians.  What and how, but never WHY.  Those who know me are probably doing the big sigh right now, but the WHY is always the most important.  Why kids should learn and how I get them excited about learning.  You see, if I get them excited about learning, the goal is to get to the point where they don’t need me in order to learn.  Their curiosity and thirst for learning will help them to be more independent, a better person and more productive citizen.

I had many teachers who got me excited about learning over the years, and a dad who was always excited to learn himself.  He would wake me at 2:00 a.m. to check out meteor showers when I was a kid, take me for a walk in the deep snow just for the adventure of it, share books of history and science where we would discuss the “what ifs”.  To this day, there are many times I see or hear something that makes me “wonder why” and I have to figure it out. Independent learning is what allows us to change and grow for the rest of our lives. Retaining something just long enough to pass a test is not going to help us with problem solving in the future. This is not learning.

So, my job this year is to make sure my kids not only learn the curriculum they need to know, but to get them so excited about it that they want to learn even more on their own.  My job is to teach them procedures like respecting people and materials to the point it becomes habit in their daily lives.  My job is to teach them how to collaborate with one another, to critique work in a way that encourages others to go farther. My job is to expose them to music of all kinds from many different places so they know that everyone shares the love of music in their own way and that’s ok. My job is to connect my subject matter to others so they see the world as connected. All this begins with building relationships with students like the little guy who said hi to me yesterday, get him excited about learning and showing him ways to becoming all he can be. 

Next week is going to be full of brand new students saying “hi Mrs. Bush!”.  I can’t wait.