About twenty years ago when teaching high school French in South Carolina, being at that point roughly half way through my teaching career, I was struggling very deeply emotionally. I was not happy in my job. The only fun I was having was after school coaching cross country and basketball and track.
The early optimistic thoughts that I had carried into teaching twenty years earlier were gone, but I had no other acceptable career choices and a family to support. With no other career options about how to get out of my predicament, I was in a very bad place mentally.
I never did, but I could have very easily kicked my dog when getting home after school every day. It was that bad. We need to be happy in our work!
One day during another of what seemed to be an unending series of planning periods where I usually just sat at my desk making up worksheets, I found a piece of paper stuck behind a pile of old books in the back of a closet in my classroom. It was a faded copy of a “personal bill of rights” written by Edmund Bourne, Ph.D.
I taped it to my desk and started to read it every day. In fact, I have never stopped reading it, even now twenty years later and living in Colorado and with a much healthier relationship with myself and my profession.
It is probably that I either forget or didn’t realize that I have these rights because I wasn’t taught them as a child growing up.
I believe that Dr. Bourne’s list applies to all of us teachers in very real ways. If we can realize these rights in our personal lives and also learn to exercise them in our classroom, then I believe that we can build a more assertive attitude to being in a school building and with it a much happier (and longer!) career.
Here is the list:
- I have the right to ask for what I want.
- I have the right to say no to requests or demands I can’t meet.
- I have the right to express all of my feelings, positive or negative.
- I have the right to change my mind.
- I have the right to make mistakes and not have to be perfect.
- I have the right to follow my own standards.
- I have the right to say no to anything when I feel I am not ready, it is unsafe, or violates my values.
- I have the right to determine my own priorities.
- I have the right not to be responsible for others’ behavior, actions, feelings, or problems.
- I have the right to expect honesty from others.
- I have the right to be angry at someone I love.
- I have the right to be uniquely myself.
- I have the right to feel scared and say “I’m scared.”
- I have the right to say “I don’t know.”
- I have the right not to give excuses or reasons for my behavior.
- I have the right to make decisions based on my feelings.
- I have the right to my own needs for personal space and time.
- I have the right to be playful and frivolous.
- I have the right to be healthier than those around me.
- I have the right to be in a non-abusive environment.
- I have the right to make friends and be comfortable around people.
- I have the right to change and grow.
- I have the right to have my needs and wants respected by others.
- I have the right to be treated with dignity and respect.
- I have the right to be happy.
Even our administrators would have to agree that few of these rights are currently allowed to us in our school buildings. That is a shocking thing to say.
But Dr. Bourne suggests that if you carefully read through this list every day, as I did (while sharing it with a lot of students along the way as well), eventually you will learn to accept that you are entitled to these rights.