When I was a teacher, I did my best to ignore the talk of students in the grades below my own. At the beginning of the year, I would be certain that I knew about any needs they had or how I could help them behaviorally (eg if they had something that triggered them) or any strategies another teacher had learned that worked for them, but other than that, I never wanted to know the negatives that had happened in the past. I tried to keep that to a minimum. Why? Because I am a firm believer in the clean slate.
We know that there are a few ways that our jobs are different than the private sector. I always consider our years to go from July 1st to June 30th. I don’t make New Year’s Eve resolutions, I create summer goals. Our “products” are children and their futures. But, my favorite aspect of being in education is that there is no other profession that has the ability to begin each new year with a clean slate, and the thought of that is so unbelievably powerful.
There were multiple times that for my students, my classroom’s clean slate meant that they had the ability to reinvent themselves once they realized I didn’t come into class with any preconceived notion about them. I had high expectations for everyone no matter what. My expectations were that they grew from wherever they were, which meant that they quickly discovered that we celebrated growth, not a number, grade, or average. For some students, they will repeatedly fail a grade, but it is much more difficult to fail completely at growing whether that growth was academic or behavioral, they had the chance to become a better version of themselves as soon as they stepped through my classroom door.
I feel this way about educators, too. I go into each school year not only giving the people around me a clean slate but myself as well. It’s the time to forgive the mistakes I had made the previous year, mend relationships after a break that had been previously strained and be a better person than I was before I wiped the slate clean. One of the beauties of education is that we have the ability once a year to start again, and we can choose how we do it.
