In the end, what really matters to you and your students? While you carry a million tasks, assessments, rubrics, mandates in your head, I’m guessing you also carry many faces of students when they are engaged, excited, sad. unreadable….
How do we come back to what really matters? We are raising children to know how to be in this world and hopefully to know how to make a life that works for them.
While teaching algebra, when you can’t link it to a practical application in life, you can link it to a way of thinking, learning how to be logical to find the missing piece whether it is a number, a letter or a piece of information they need to make an important decision.
While teaching persuasive writing, you can link the skill to many parts of their lives like one teacher who had students identify one thing they wanted that they would persuade their parents to agree with–a little risky, yes. But he helped them identify something reasonable and worthwhile trying for. Underneath that skill, again, is an inner ability to identify a goal and work toward achieving it.
Sorting and sifting to determine importance, finding patterns, logical and analysis, perseverance and persistence….ways of inquiring, discovering, thinking that can be learned no matter the content and then internalized for lifelong strengths.
Everything we teach that matters, has an underlying skill, habit of mind, process, exercise, that can go help students as human beings, including and beyond the specific academic standard of it.