Children learn by catching your sense of discovery, wonder and enthusiasm about a subject, not by having to manage lots of fragments of information. If you don’t want it to go in one ear and out the other, find the way to reconnect yourself (not your students, you!) with the joy of discovering the subject as if for the first time.
Educators are here on earth to quicken the spirit of learning, to spark that sense of discovery, to trigger the uncontainable enthusiasm that goes with being human on the journey of life, the feeling that the future is open and everything is possible!
This may be the 100th time you have approached a certain subject. It may feel tedious and redundant to you. But to your students it is not. For them, learning the water cycle, or learning the difference between nouns and verbs, or learning about people from a foreign land, or being able to put their thoughts on paper may open wondrous new worlds!
Make it new for you! Theaterize it! Yes! Act the lesson out! C’mon, break through those dusty inhibited habits. Put the lesson to verse, rhyming verse. Make it a new challenge for you. Make a story out of it. Sing it, rap it! Make a field trip out of it. Whatever it takes.
If you are in it, they will catch it from you! There’s nothing more contagious and compelling than the feeling of beginning; doing something for the first time. It’s fresh, it’s clean, it’s new and it’s all you have to do. Simply enter the subject as if it were the first time………every time!
~paz
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Quotes:
“Enthusiasm is contagious. Be a carrier.”
~Susan Rabin
“The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another.”
~Marva Collins
~Barbara Sher
“In the beginner‘s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few” ~Shunryu Suzuki
