What a powerful post! After reading this veteran teacher's post reflecting on her experience with persistence in her classroom, both with her students and how it's affected her, there are many things I can relate to and agree with.
I'm inspired by the idea of persistence because, quite frankly, without it, I may not show up to work each day. What we do as teachers is one of the hardest jobs there is and you have to have grit, passion and persistence to do what we do. I also easily relate to having students like "Kara" in my class who seem nearly impossible to figure out. However, I learned very early on in my first year that if I gave up on these types of students...I'd be no different than all the other adults in their lives. Most often, these students are behaving the way they are because they WANT you to give up on them...why not, when everyone else does?
I too discovered that keeping the consistently positive relationship is key to making any progress.
However, it is this that I struggle most with. Sticking to it is EXHAUSTING!! Both emotionally and physically draining in every sense of the word. You love them, yet you can only be knocked down, rejected and faced with failure so many times. What I have learned is that these truly are the students you learn the most from and these students inspire me to teach all students the importance of persistence.
I feel that teaching my students what persistence means, looks like, FEELS like is key to success in my room. All students can benefit from knowing how to persist in times of struggle and why persisting is worth the effort. As Lily Jones quotes: "The road to success is filled with failure." Many of my students know what failure feels like, so to help them understand that persistence leads us to overcome these failures is a a life lesson I'd love to leave with them.
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