Building a sense of community in our classrooms guarantees good physical health and good mental health for us and our children.
Teachers burn out when they are not in strong community, because they sense that they are alone in the classrooms, with only a few good memorizers on their side and every other child, to some extent or other, their enemy.
There is the sense in traditional classrooms that it’s all false. How can children be happy being in community if they rightly perceive that their efforts in class are not acceptable, since only the few succeed in such classrooms?
The results of a lack of community in a classroom range from mental to physical exhaustion, never a good thing.We must pay particular close attention to this problem before we go plunging in cavalier fashion into next year. It is not good for us to teach in the old way. It is not good for us.
The shift we are in is from competition to cooperation. It is far more than what it appears to be. Cooperation builds health; competition destroys it. It is not just a shift away from bad teaching that only involves a smalls fraction of kids with negligeable results and only huge profits for textbook companies and job security for date gatherers. The shift we are in goes to the very core of how we define community and health.
In this work we do, and perhaps one reason it is so resisted, the teacher must enter into authentic relationship with every single child in the room. Watch Linda Li teach. Most teachers consider that too daunting, too much a drain on their energy.
But they are so wrong. Just the opposite happens. Real heart links with our students are built and not just shallow mind links. Isn’t that what we want our jobs to be like?
We can do this thing, y’all. We can and we will. We will not let the failures of the past drag us down. There is too much too hope for, too many health benefits, too much fun, too much professional satisfaction. And it all starts with a good story.
