Teaching is traveling

            Teaching is traveling. As a teacher, it is so important to truly get to know your students and be able to answer questions about individuals like: Who is this child? Where do you come from? What is your family life like? How do you learn best? What are your strengths, your aspirations? What inspires you? What do you fear? You must strive to identify with and understand them.

When you travel, you immerse yourself in new cultures. You learn all there is to know about how people live, their communication style, food, religion, their values and beliefs. Through this quest for knowledge and understanding, you are able to gain a sense of relatedness and connectedness with people who may be significantly different from you. This also nourishes a sense of respect and a belief that we need to embrace our differences. When we pause to consider where someone else comes from and what makes them who they are, we are able to put ourselves in their shoes and empathize with them. This is what we must do as teachers. In order to have the greatest positive impact in the lives of our students, we must truly and sincerely understand them. We must also strive to foster the idea of empathizing with others and embracing our differences in our students as well.

I also like to think of the metaphor, teaching is traveling, as it relates to the journey a teacher and her students have together over the course of the school year. Before you begin any trip, you must first decide where it is you wish to visit. What interests you about this particular place? Why do you want to visit? How are you going to get there? And perhaps most importantly, what do you hope to get out of this trip? The process of planning a trip is very similar to that of beginning a school year with a classroom full of new students. Forming a community and finding commonalities in what we all hope to learn over the course of the year together are important first steps in establishing goals and creating a positive learning environment where everyone will thrive. We also must answer, how are we going to get there together and what can each of us do to ensure that? Having students reflect on their own learning and what they hope to take away from their school year enables them to feel as though they are an important part of planning our journey together.