Calling All Improvers

For those who have taken the SubSkills Training Course or read The Substitute Teacher Handbook you will be familiar with the idea that it is easy for a teacher to fall into traps. Those traps include the questioning trap, the threat trap, and the despair and pleading trap. These are labeled as traps because teachers often think they are encouraging students to get on task, when in reality they aren't.

There are other traps that are easy for teachers to fall into that don't necessarily have to do with classroom management. Allow me to explain two of them.

The first trap is the "head in the clouds" trap. This can be best described as teachers who truly believe each day is the best day of all days. Their students are perfect angels and their teaching days go perfectly smooth.

The second trap that's easy to fall into is the "too realistic" trap. You'll often find educators who are so realistic that they don't have much good to say about the classroom. (The students they work with are terrible because of awful parenting, for example.)

It's pretty easy in education to find people who like to hold up a picture of true reality for others to see and shatter the world that optimists have created. They don't see the good in their students. They like to hear stories from other teachers and then pop their bubbles with a hard dose of reality, "enlightening" them on what the classroom and students are REALLY like.

The problem with these two traps is that neither are appropriate ways to approach the classroom. We need a third category of people. We need teachers who are two parts optimist and one part realist. It's okay to see the faults of the education system, the school, or our philosophies, but we also need to spend more time mending those problems and improving where we can (which start with improving ourselves).

I propose that we make a third category of teachers. This third category I will call "improvers." People who are too negative... or too positive... have no clout with me. So if you consider yourself in this third category, I need your help.

I am looking for people to contribute to a section of the blog called, "A Day in the Life." I want people who are interested in substitute teaching to be able to review what it's really like in the classroom. I want these perspectives to contain two parts optimism and one part reality.

If you feel you can view the classroom this way and would like to be a contributor to the Bus Stop Blog, please email your "Day in the Life" article to Jessica@STEDI.org. The articles should be between 300-500 words – only the best articles will be accepted.