Reflections After Hitting a Milestone

Recently a fellow educator on twitter, MorganLeming3, replied to a rather fun post from Nicholas Ferroni: How long have you been in education? (only using references and not the number)

My students have this insane curiosity about how old I am. Ranges go from 30 (so kind!) to 63 (so... ummm.... unexpected?)  They try to use context clues (the age of my kids, the fact that I've been teaching longer than any student in the school has been alive...)   I run lots, so I can't be THAT old, but I have a son in college, so I have to be at least 50, but I have a daughter that is only a year older than them so then I have to be about their parents age. 

So generally I give references like that to the question posed in the twitter post.  Realizing some facts, I decided to see how long I was a teacher.

What is crazy... what I found amazing... is from the day I was born to the day I first entered my first classroom after signing my first contract is LESS THAN the number of days from that day to today. 

I have literally been a teacher for longer than I have NOT been a teacher. 

This statistic amazed me. I have literally been a teacher over half of my life. 

And that has led to lots of reflection.  I started teaching back in the late 90s - before standardized testing, before common core, before Google was a publicly traded company. I started teaching before students had cell phones or social media.  I started teaching before you could get a new overhead projector with free two-day delivery... and back when we said overhead projector, we meant this:

Say hi to Elmo!

It is amazing both how much education has changed, and how it has stayed the same over these 20+ years. We have made so much growth in understanding how the pre-adolescent and adolescent brain encodes information. We have made so much progress on understanding various learning difficulties and how to best serve students that learn in non-traditional ways. 

There are so many changes that have happened within the classroom, both with this new knowledge, and also to keep up with the latest trends. I have been teaching a while, but looking back at how much technology has changed in the past two decades, it is amazing that there is anything that looks the same anymore. What do students still sit in rows and columns? (pre-covid, that is.) Why do students still give study guides the day before tests? Why do we still punish students with lower grades for late work or for retakes? Why do we still reward students with extra points on assignments that don't connect to learning targets (one box of tissues = 5 bonus points!) Why do we still average in zeroes to final grades? Why do we still depend so heavily on worksheets (PS - if you do, I highly recommend the book Boredom Busters by Katie Powell) 

Education has so much room for growth still and I hope to witness, and even be a voice in that change, over the next part of my career.