Teachers Need and Deserve Respect!

The one thing I remember being the hardest part of teaching is gaining my student's respect, but I knew without it, they wouldn't trust me and learn as well from me. What good is a teacher who isn't helping their students learn? So, I created a few activities that I used every year with my students, and I'm excited to share them with other teachers who may struggle as I did for many years.

This is just a small sample of what this 17 page document contains. To see the whole document, click here.

Gaining Reciprocal Respect

 Between Teachers & their Students

*Please note: These activities can be modified and adapted to meet almost any grade level. I focus on the 7^th and 8^th grade levels because I know, through first hand experience, that they can be successful with that age range.

Purpose

It’s every teacher’s dream to be able to enrich their student’s lives with a quality education. The fact that you are expected to do this at the most difficult time developmentally, and highly hormonal, can be quite disconcerting at times, especially at middle school and junior high levels.

As a teacher of seventh and eighth grade students for fifteen years, I learned that the most important thing to first establish with your students, before you even begin actually trying to teach them curriculum, is to gain a mutual RESPECT from them.

I know, sounds very easy, but in actuality, may be the hardest thing for an educator to establish. It’s very easy to fall into the idea that teachers are the authority and students must obey, but I promise you (and I’ve seen it happen over and over again to teachers I worked with), if you start off with new students, and you present yourself as the almighty powerful authority figure that you are, you will lose more than half of your students in the beginning, and never establish a safe, comfortable learning community with those students.

And if you are fine with those statistics, then I bid you good luck, and you can feel free to stop reading.

Still there? 

Great!

Ready to read about a few very simple, fun, and extremely rewarding activities, which I personally used many times in my own classroom, to establish a learning tone with my students.

Am I perfect? NO way!

I’m willing to bet that in each class I taught there was always one or two students that never let their guard down, for whatever reason, and I may not have impacted their lives like the others, but I definitely like those odds better than if I alienate all of them right off the bat with a standoffish and rigid attitude as a teacher. Plus, I’ve never had any complaints from parents or teachers about some of the activities I used intermittently during the curriculum. Many students said occasionally doing projects like these helped them focus more on curricular matters when the time came, and valuable life lessons that helped shape them.

As far as I’m concerned, I don’t know you personally, but if you have read this far, I know enough about you as a teacher to know you are dedicated to bettering yourself as an educator for your students. Kudos!

-Ma Bixby

Here's a sneak peek at the short story I wrote to use with Activity 3, Things you Should Know.... 

Jack’s STORY

I’ve heard this story told in different ways, but the message remains the same each time.

There was this boy. His name was Jack. Jack came from another country as a toddler and struggled to fit in and learn the English language. Jack’s family didn’t have a lot of money, and his parents both worked full time jobs. Jack was an only child. Jack was an artist. He could get lost in a drawing, which eventually became something he used to cope with difficult situations.

Jack went to school for many years and tried very hard to fit in with his classmates, but instead a few of his classmates decided to launch a campaign against Jack that would torment Jack for years. They would laugh at the way he spoke, using the wrong tense of a word or the wrong word altogether, and he became their target. Soon, it wasn’t just a few classmates harassing Jack on a daily basis anymore. They would yank on his backpack to make his books fall out, take parts of his lunch while he was in mid-bite, and that’s just a small sample of what went on in Jack’s daily life.

Jack was miserable, but he never let anyone know it. His parents worked such hard and long hours, that Jack barely saw them. He never spoke to anyone at school about what was happening, or his feelings.

One day, Jack was gone from school. For three days, no one even noticed. Then at lunch time one day, someone noticed a couple walking with the principal towards Jack’s locker, and finally said aloud, “Hey, isn’t that Jack’s locker? Are those his parents? Wait, where has that little weirdo been all week? He never misses school?”

To read the rest, or see the activities I use with this story, please 

click here.

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