If I had a million dollars, I'd build you a school.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Why Are We Here?

I have some more thoughts today from our week of end-of-year faculty meetings. Monday morning's meeting was a very big picture kind of affair. That was just fine with me. Since I will be at a different school in the fall, philosophical discussions about teaching are much more interesting to me than nuts and bolts about next school year. After fifteen minutes to journal about the year (my thoughts here), our division head went up to the board and wrote the question, "Why are we here?" in big purple letters. The brainstorming session that followed was wide ranging, and often deteriorated into discussion of people's pet concerns, but generally provided an interesting take on what it is that a school is supposed to do. Here is a selection of the answers that we came up with. I present them without comment for now. Many of them are worthy of a post, or a couple of posts, of their own.

Why Are We Here?

  • for the children
  • to set an example/model behavior
  • to learn
  • to share a passion
  • to nurture
  • to make a difference
  • to teach problem solving
  • to make the children responsible and polite
  • to be aware of students' lives outside of school
  • friendship/to support each other
  • to teach the parents
  • to build a sense of community
  • to set consistent expectations
  • to take time for teachable moments
  • to give consequences and to follow through
  • to supervise/ensure safety of children
  • to share
  • to better serve the invisible students

I'll come back to many of these in future posts, but for now I'll just leave them out there for you to think about.

Anything you would add/remove from the list?

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