Happy New Year!

Today was open house at Bel Air Middle School and I had the chance to meet my incoming sixth graders. Some admitted to their nervousness and others were openly excited.  I am exhausted tonight and hopeful that I made a lasting first impression. 

First impressions are very much on my mind this year as I send my youngest off to kindergarten.  I want her to feel safe, to feel important, to feel included, and to love her first formal school year. I remember sending her big sister off to kindergarten at Sparks Elementary with the same hopes.  Fortunately, Allyson has been placed with the same teacher, Mrs. Ashley Eckman.  Mrs. Eckman is a teacher who wanted to be a teacher since her childhood.  You can walk into her classroom and feel the excitement, the structure, the invitation to learn, and the promise of a lasting impression. 

The activities from Mrs. Eckman’s  class were dinner conversation in my house for a year.  To Grace, she was the world.  My two daughters are so very different, but I know that they will each fall in love with learning because of teachers like Mrs. Eckman. 

I read an article recently by Kylene Beers where she shares how her daughter fell in love with learning because of her first grade teacher.  As a former educator and a parent, Kylene writes, “Though I had been a teacher for years before having Meredith, before sending her off to first grade, I had never truly understood the power of a teacher in a child’s life.  We give our most precious and priceless to you- dear teachers- each year, knowing you will teach them, but also hoping you will care for them, help them discover how very much they matter, watching over them, and being there when they have been hurt by the ones that won’t let them sit at the “popular” table—and then you do just that and they fall in love with you.  It shows up in different ways, as they grow older. But it’s still there, this deep affection and respect. And, certainly, it’s harder to forge those bonds when there are 150 students instead of 22, when the day is fragmented into 45 minute segments, when education seems to be more about the test than the child. But I promise, underneath that bravado of the seventh grader or swagger of the tenth grader you will find that small first grader who wonders, “Will my teacher like me?” And when that child—that teen—knows that you believe he or she matters, than that student will do most anything for you.”

I know that students fall in love with learning because of teachers.  I know Grace loved kindergarten because of Mrs. Eckman.  I am confident that when Ally walks through the door of Mrs. Eckman’s classroom that she will know from moment one that she matters. 

So, it is after eleven and I am tired from today.  Is it worth it to make such in impression? Absolutely! As Bill Wilson wrote, “To the world you may be one person, but to one person you are the world.” That is the beauty of teaching.  That is the gift that we are given at the start of each new year. 

Thank you for the work that you are already doing to make students excited to learn! Best wishes for the start of the 2012-13 school year!