Why I Teach

For the rest of my life I will remember the face of one of my girls this afternoon:

This little girl (literally little) in 5th grade is one of 52 amazing students I met as 4th graders.  They are with no exaggeration  nothing short of amazing!  So happy to learn, so eager to learn, and so incredibly talented. As they hit that love time called adolescence, their are some more imperfections coming to the surface, but their intelligence is not dwindling.

Reading music comes naturally to many of them and when they took their benchmark last week I was expecting them to do incredibly well on it.  Minus some students who did not show up for their performance, and some who are still lost in the notation, all of them scored "Proficient" or "Advanced" and I was so happy with the results:  confirmations that Orff can work for these kids when they are willing to let go of themselves and have fun.

We all, including their classmates, have expectations of some of the more advanced students:  that they will always get everything right.  Well today that did not happen.  A lot of them missed one or two questions that I anticipated them getting wrong, but I did not anticipate this little girl to blow even the advanced students out of the water.  With her ELL struggles and general quiet nature, she was learning her music at a slower pace and was always nervous to answer questions or seek me out for help.  As I tallied scores, she did not miss a single question.  The only student in her class of 52 to do this.

I sang praises of so many of them to their teachers and I waited at lunch to tell my little girl the news.  When I  told her she didn't miss any questions, there were no words coming from her mouth, only the largest smile that I've ever seen from her that radiated from her eyes and her entire face.  Her breathing picked up and her smile grew.  I actually made a student speechless in a good way!  I was almost in tears of happiness and had to hug her to keep myself from crying and also worried that she might hyperventilate.

Just thinking about that moment day after day gives me chills, and those are the moments that keep me teaching.