It is a unique experience to have a room full of 30 sets of eyes looking at you, expecting you to have all the answers. And it certainly adds to the experience to know that by the end of the year you will know what each of those eyes needs, you will know their struggles and their strengths, you will know who needs to be the center of attention and who wants to hide in the back even though they shouldn’t, and you know that in spite of what they need, you may not be able to give it to them. This is being a teacher, and this is what I’ve always wanted to do.
But after several years standing in front of expectant little ones, I’ve realized that I want to teach kids to think, to learn, and to understand. However, that is not what being teacher is, being a teacher is doing all of those things while also cramming this
into 350 different brains and then testing them on it. Above is the pile of 7th grade Social Studies content that students are required to understand by the end of the year.
So, I am no longer a teacher, I am an Academic Coach. This was not a decision I took lightly; I spent 12 years of my life working towards being an educator, and 5 years studying it. But I realized teaching isn’t always being an educator, it is being a parent, a politician,and a sage on the stage of content driven classrooms. But coaching allows me to not only be an educator, but it allows me to provide the tools a student needs to succeed.
As a Coach I can learn how each individual student learns. With that understanding, I can cater the content to them, instead of the other way around (imagine a square peg round hole issue). As a Coach I can celebrate mistakes as learning opportunities, I can teach skills instead of dates, I can step outside of ‘plug and chug’ and into learning, away from memorizing and into understanding.
And that is being an educator, not a teacher, but a Coach.
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