For the month of April, I am participating in the Blog A Day Challenge for educators. All prompts are provided by Meredith Towne (@BklynMeredith), an educator from New York.
My greatest strengths as an educator…I see this prompt and my mind floods with all of my weaknesses. When I talk to my colleagues, our conversations often include all of the things we do wrong, the ways we fall short. We rarely discuss our successes and strengths. Perhaps it’s our Puritan DNA, the part of us that is hesitant to brag or boast lest God strike us down. Perhaps it’s decades of being blamed for all of society’s problems–we as a profession somehow bought into the idea that none of us has any strengths at all.
So let me dig deep…and think…
My greatest strength as an educator is that I still care about education. Even on my most jaded day, I can’t help but figure out how to ensure the next day is better. When lessons fail, I reassess and improve them. When I get a general feeling that everyone is barely hanging on, I give all of us permission to delay a due date, to review a concept, to have down time.
I care about education, about my building, about my students.
That is my greatest strength as an educator, because as long as I can keep caring, I will keep improving. As long as I can keep caring, I can find new approaches to stale lessons. As long as I keep caring, I will miss seniors when they graduate and help underclassmen embrace opportunities left by those seniors’ absences.
My greatest, and perhaps my only, strength as an educator is that I care.
Julie Rowse 