Michael Bonner - Get Up or Give Up: How I Almost Gave Up on Teaching

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

Get Up or Give Up:

How I Almost Gave Up On Teaching

2017 by Michael Bonner

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-68261-587-4

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-68261-588-1

Cover Photography by Paris Silver, Parisphoto.com

Cover Design by Tricia Principe, triciaprincipedesign.com

Interior Design and Composition by Greg Johnson/Textbook Perfect

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

Ron Clark Who?

One person with passion is better than
forty people merely interested.

E. M. Forster

T he ice slowly melted off my windshield as I waited for my car to warm up. It was a chilly day in January and the students had just left the school building to go home. I popped in my auxiliary cord, guided my way to one of my favorite Apple music playlists, and allowed the tunes to serenade me as I set my car on cruise control to go home. As I reflected on the school day, I thought of the different things I could have done to engage my students in my classroom. We were covering text features in guided reading, and my students were not grasping the content. I found myself either repeating the directions multiple times or noticing that most kids were not engaged in the content at all. Instead of my classroom feeling like an educational oasis, from the expression on my students faces and formative assessments, my classroom was more of a parched desert.

As I arrived at my apartment, I threw on some sweatpants and plopped down on my uncomfortable college-era futon. That was all I could afford since I was still in the process of a legal separation from my wife. As I opened my Instagram application and went to the explore page, a video caught my eye. In this particular video, there was a well-dressed, medium-built Caucasian man surrounded by about eight African-American kids, and they were participating in a popular dance challenge. I probably watched that video about four to five times, jealous that my 6-foot-5 frame could not move in such a fluid manner. Immediately I was intrigued, trying to figure out who this man in the videowho had the audacity to be dancing with students in a classroomwas. That was unheard of in my educational courses.

As I continued to watch the video, I noticed it was not the widescreen smart board that was behind them as they moved in a poetic manner to a popular hip-hop song that drew my attention. Nor was it the beautiful mural that was painted on the classroom wall. It was the relationship and connectivity between him and the students that spoke so profoundly to me through the art of videography. I immediately began reading the comments, searching for who this man was, and right away, I began learning a lot of information about Ron Clark. I looked at his movie via YouTube and began to understand his journey and how he was able to start the prestigious Ron Clark Academy (RCA) with the elegant educational juggernaut herself, Kim Bearden. As the months went on, I found myself looking up different resources about the school and the types of educational techniques they used to make a lasting impact on their students.

Some time passed before I had the opportunity to meet Ron Clark in person, and I quickly understood why Oprah fell in love with him. The passion he has for teaching can be seen exuding from his face when he begins to talk about his students. Educational equity radiated from his philosophy on teaching when he explained the importance of teaching history from all cultures, not just the majority culture. He explained the importance of making text relevant, not for the sake of compliance, but for his students to use the information they learned in order to breathe new life into their self-confidence. Not only did he verbalize his concepts, but every individual of his team supported his vision and maximized every opportunity to make this a reality within their own classrooms. I knew within the first five minutes I spent with him that this guy talked the talk and walked the walk. As I followed him and other educators from RCA throughout the day, I noticed they all had one common trait in every fiber of their beinga passion to educate. In each educator classroom that I stepped into dedication for teaching immediately grabbed me and kept my attention, to the point that I found myself not paying attention to the clock but holding on to every word spoken. I knew personally that this concept would be the first key to unlocking a world of endless possibilities within my classroom.

One of the biggest misconceptions about infusing passion when you teach is understanding how passion bubbles to the surface. A person does not have to stand on a table dancing and teaching in order to show devotion to teaching. A person does not have to stay at work until 7 p.m. to demonstrate their passion for teaching. I have learned over the course of my career and by watching amazing teachers that passion takes the form of the personality within an individual teacher. I have seen teachers who may have a low speaking voice, but their physical movements and excitement about the content they are teaching inspires every student also to be excited about what is going to happen in class that day. We cannot place passion within a defined box and expect every teacher to display the same type of movements as other energetic educators, because that cuts into the unique build and structure of each individual. But we can demand that teachers across America transform their approaches and perspectives about what they are teaching. We can demand that teachers across America begin to understand how paramount our jobs really are, and how we have a daily responsibility to change a students life. Inside the classroom, a teacher can be compared to a ringmaster at the circus. We educators have the ability to put on a show that will wow the masses and leave them with memories they can share with their grandkids. Or we have the potential to create a disaster in our classroom where learning isnt happening and students leave the same way they came in 180 days ago.

I have learned from my own classroom experiences as I attempted to restructure the town of Bonnerville that students ultimately do care about where you direct your passions. I absolutely love teaching second grade math. It could be because there are no complex algebraic equations involved or critical formulas for students to remember. It could be the joy of pulling out fake money and seeing the kids react; that is always entertaining, to say the least. The way you can apply real-life concepts and situations to create better student awareness and understanding is endless when it comes to numbers. But when it came to guided reading, well, that was a completely different story. Guided Reading is so similar to shooting free throws. You have to find a consistent and effective routine to enforce in order to see progress. In laymans terms, it took me a while to develop this routine and it often left me frustrated. The amount of time it took to develop four guided reading plans for four different groups seemed like it consumed most of my weekends during the schoolyear. With maintaining numerous running records, creating engaging stations so that students would not get distracted while simultaneously keeping my attention on the guided reading group at my table was a complex task.

My lack of passion for teaching reading began to infiltrate my classroom culture and before I knew it, my students were complaining when it was time to go to their reading stations. And for a moment, in ignorance, I sat frustrated, believing it was their fault that their reading scores were below proficiency and it was their lack of motivation that literacy was somehow linked to poverty or their parents not reading with them at home. When I came to the realization that students care about what the teacher is most passionate about, things began to change for the better within my classroom. The same way misery has the ability to shift the energy within a room and change the dynamic of relationships, so does the electric force of passion possess the same effect. When I changed my mind and started infusing my passion for reading into exciting lessons that were grounded in literacy, when I started pulling Guided Reading books that the students would be interested in reading and strategically linking real world connections to different text, my classroom climate began to improve drastically. Before I knew it, my passion for teaching my children with the content at hand permeated so deeply within our classroom that students began to complain when we ran out of time during the reading stations.