Teachers are in the business of creating relationships. Yes, I teach music, however the effectiveness of the students' education is reliant on us having a positive relationship built on trust, respect, and service.
In order to have a meaningful relationship with students as with any other people in our lives we have to reveal parts of ourselves, and communicate with honesty while being genuine. Unlike social relationships, teachers have to maintain a safe and appropriate relationship with their students, which means that we have be calculating and deliberate about what we share our lives outside the classroom into our teaching.
At this point in my career it isn’t hard to know what to bring into my classroom, but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to do what I know is right.
Coming back from my child-rearing leave, all of my students wanted to see pictures of my new baby, Lucas. I realized that I hadn’t shared with my students this year about my family. I used to be more deliberate about doing this towards the beginning of the year, but for some reason, I didn’t pause to take care of this recently. So I made a little slide show and it’s been really fun sharing some pictures and videos of my children to my students.
Earlier in the year, a song that I loved “Crowded Table,” fit into our curriculum, so I was able to genuinely teach a song that I loved. My curricular focus is generally not based on teaching music that I love, but rather teaching music that is effective and meaningful to my students. Once in a while music I love outside of class can become music I teach, but that’s rare.
There have been times when things I experienced in my life I can bring in and talk about like when David Bowie died. I taught my students a lesson about his work, his fashion and music and how he influence my life and my expression of masculinity. When my maternal grandmother passed away, I told my students about her and even shared some pictures from my trip to Taiwan.
Then there are things that happen in our lives that we can’t talk to our kids about, and we have to compartmentalize. There’s feeling about current events that put us in moods that are not fair to show students. There are stresses from personal lives that we need to make sure that we don’t project onto our students. And here are things that we know about “behind the scenes” at school that students cannot know, but we can’t but think about when we see their eyes.
This is exhausting, this act, this effort, we make to present ourselves in a way that isn’t genuinely how we feel. It seems like a contradiction since we should be genuine with our students, but we can’t always be that. Even if we faking smiles, what we can always make genuine is our expression of care for our students and our desire for them to be better. Sometimes, sometimes, this genuine care, focusing on our students in the moment can make us feel better about all of the baggage that we bring.
Other times, it’s simply exhausting like holding up a wall. It's in this feeling that I find myself needing to take care of myself and let myself process all that is going on in my life.
Teacher's can't keep walls up forever, so sometimes we need to focus more on taking care of ourselves, so we can take care of our students.
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