I have something of a milestone circling my life right now. My birthday was yesterday, and I turned 48 years old. When this current school year comes to an end in a matter of weeks, I will have been teaching 24 years. In case you haven’t done the math already, this means I’ve spent half of my not-short life teaching, and all at the same school.
Last month when I was asking around for ideas to write about this May, someone suggested to write about life lessons I’ve learned from my students. To commemorate this meaningful (at least to me) confluence of years, here are 24 things, generalized to a certain degree, that I’ve learned about life from spending half of mine sitting behind the big desk.
1. Simple pleasures can be everything. I’ve seen people run around the classroom in the morning, offering high-fives to everyone they see, just because there’s grilled cheese for lunch that day.
2. Effort and attitude are far greater indicators of student success than intelligence and ability.
3. Mean girls and bullies start young and last well into adulthood.
4. If something smells bad, whether it’s body odor, or vinegar from science class, or a fart, or a plastic container half-filled with ranch dressing that’s been lost in a desk or a locker for a month, children will pull their shirts up over their faces so quickly it’s almost as if it was something they were born knowing how to do.
5. Every morsel of school breakfast gets eaten. At least a third of most school lunches get thrown away.
6. The education catch phrase “what’s best for kids” is frequently used as a quick and easy way for people to claim the high road in several professional disagreements.
7. When kids today talk about getting together to play after school, they usually mean meeting up on a server instead of at a playground.
8. My childhood was a ride around the lake compared to the nightmarish lives I’ve seen too many students try to survive. So was yours.
9. Outside of occasional token acknowledgements, teachers are under-appreciated by our society.
10. Children are funnier than adults. Too many adults think that just mentioning sex or body parts or using inappropriate language is more than enough to pass for having a sense of humor. Children don’t rely on those crutches and can make jokes out of just about anything.
11. Parents tend to take youth sports WAY MORE seriously than children do.
12. Not many children younger than ten are truly independent thinkers. The ones who are can be fascinating to know.
13. Most behavior problems that aren’t related to some kind of medical issue can be traced to a lack, or an absence, of love and attention.
14. Children are more honest and more forgiving than adults.
15. Children frequently give their teachers credit for being better people than they (we) actually are.
16. There are always exceptions to the rule of course, but usually boys carry a much greater sense of entitlement than girls do.
17. Too many parents go creatively overboard when it comes time to decide how to spell their child’s name.
18. Bathroom breaks are more often mental breaks than actual bathroom breaks.
19. Children are either organized or they aren’t. There is no middle ground here.
20. Children care about racial differences far less than many adults do.
21. The length of the honeymoon period at the beginning of the elementary school year is inversely proportionate to the numeric value of the grade level.
22. If a child falls asleep in class, you let them sleep. There are probably reasons you don’t know about that would explain why they’re so tired.
23. As children start to figure out everything wrong with the world they’re going to inherit, they aren’t happy about it.
24. When you most desperately need to clear your head, sometimes all it takes is a box of crayons and a fresh sheet of paper to get the job done.
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