A new school year is dawning, and we need to begin to refocus the purpose of education. For the past 5 or 6 years, education has switched to focusing on emotional and mental health. How this is a good thing, this isn’t and shouldn’t be the main focus of education. The classroom is not a counseling room. The classroom is for preparing and building 21st-century skills in students to make them ready for life beyond the classroom. These skills include hard work, perseverance, communication, collaboration, teamwork, attention to detail, discipline, and more. If our classrooms are not focused on developing these skills, we are doing our students a disservice.
Politics have destroyed, and are continuing to destroy, the classroom. As I have stated in previous posts, the classroom should be void of all political and personal ideologies and agendas. When these things are allowed to happen in the school, indoctrination occurs. The classroom is not a soapbox for pushing ideologies and agendas. Suppose educators are more concerned with pushing political and personal opinions rather than teaching real-world skills our students need to be successful beyond the classroom. In that case, our students, society, and future are in peril.
Let’s make the classroom a place of learning, exploration, growth, and skill-building to help our students become better thinkers, developers, inventors, and, most importantly, positive contributors to society. We are greatly lacking mental fortitude and respect in our society. Rather than being problem solvers and people of change, we have a culture of victimization, disrespect, shamelessness, and flippancy. We no longer have a society that thinks outside the box or seeks ways to help or support each other. There is no longer a spirit of ownership and discipline, and it is because of what our classrooms have turned into. This needs to change.
In my classroom, I have a poster of 5 pillars that uphold everything we do in class. These pillars include Discipline, Hard Work, Responsibility, Respect, and Integrity. I spend a lot of time at the beginning of the year going over these pillars and explaining their value and importance in learning and life. As a class, we review each pillar throughout the year to keep them fresh. Sometimes, I will have students do writing assignments that center around these five pillars and how they implement them in their own life. When students turn in less than satisfactory work, we review the five pillars, determine what areas they seem to be struggling in, and create pathways to get them back to where they need to be. Without a solid foundation, nothing worth building can be built.
These are just a few of the qualities that need to be reimplemented in the classroom. Personal opinions, ideologies, political views, and agendas have no place in the classroom. If you are a teacher, be who you want to be outside of the school, but inside the classroom, the focus should be on supporting and developing students with skills that will help them be successful beyond the classroom – both academically and characteristically. I am not saying that opinions should not be discussed in the classroom. However, the teacher’s opinion doesn’t matter, nor should it be shared. Teachers need to allow students to work through supporting and building their viewpoints and ideas, but they should not be pushing students to think and believe the same as them. That is not their job!
You might say that the five pillars I have in my room are a personal agenda or opinion, which you very well may be correct, but the difference is that the pillars in my room are focused on helping students build a solid, quality foundation in which they can grow and be successful beyond the classroom. I am not telling them what to think or what they should believe. The pillars in my room come from the minds and experiences of numerous successful athletes, businessmen, and businesswomen. Since it is my job as an educator to help my students succeed in life beyond the classroom, I will teach them the qualities and characteristics that other successful individuals have shared that have helped them achieve success.
The classroom needs to be a place of skill-building and preparation for life in the real world. If teachers are not focused on helping students build the skills and characteristics needed for success beyond school, then they are doing a disservice to students. If what teachers teach has nothing to do with academic standards and rigor, then they do not belong in the classroom. If teachers want to use the classroom for their own personal soapbox to push ideologies, politics, and agendas, they need to be removed from the classroom and have their teaching license revoked.
The classroom is not for the teacher. It is for building and developing skills that students need to succeed beyond the classroom.
Welcome To The Classroom 