I was talking with a friend the other day and we got chatting about how kids influence teachers sometimes more than teachers influence kids and thought I’d share a couple of thoughts with you on that today.
Hey, here’s a thought for you. Do you think that your students influence you more than you influence them? Have you thought about it? Does the quality of the class that comes into you and how they behave, impact your disposition, your feeling about them? Whether you think that they’re the toughest class of all the classes you teach, kids will have a huge influence on you. Of course it’s our job to, to change their behavior and create an environment in which we can live comfortably.
Create an Environment in PE Where you Can Thrive!
You know, that’s always the first thing I say to teachers, if you’re not comfortable teaching here and you feel like you’re fighting your students, how about creating an environment in which you can live comfortably? When you and your students can live comfortably, that’s a huge plus.
Certainly students differ in their ability, but all students are of equal worth. It’s your job to try to teach kids that none of them are special. They’re all special, but they have to work within the guidelines of your environment. Management is a way of doing that. If you allow some of your students to be outliers, in other words, some don’t have to follow the rules, it slowly pushes them away from the group and they become outliers and they don’t feel a part of your class anymore. That learning environment is huge. Another thing you have to understand is that your kids come to you from extremely wide and differing backgrounds. I mean, just think about it. There was a study done in which they looked at kids by the age of three, if you can believe it. In professional families, some kids had received a half a million positives and 80,000 negatives. So it was a rich, very great environment for them. And then you turn it around and low income families and families that were striving to to survive, there were 80,000 positives versus 200,000 negatives. So here’s this one batch of kids coming to you from a very negative environment and another group coming from a very positive environment.
Not All Students Should Be Treated Equally
You can’t treat all kids the same because if you are hard on kids who come from a negative background, they basically will quit. They don’t have the backlog, positive experiences. So it’s very important in your learning environment that you take into effect that all kids need to feel good about themselves and you don’t treat all students the same. In fact, they’re all different and you’re going to have to treat them all different.
When you start thinking, wow, this is really a tough class. It’s probably only two or three students that are causing you the problem, causing you knew the heartburn, and if you will get those three or four into the fold and bring them back into the group, that class no longer will be a negative. It will be a positive and you’ll feel stronger about it because you shaped them to be a much better class and that always feels good.
