Here is Part 2 of my interview withn Rebecca Mieliwocki, the 2012 National Teacher of the Year. In the second half of the interview she talk about the different stages in her professional career, advice, work/life balance and why teaching is (still) the best job in the world.
She talks about the importance of balance, taking breaks, how to stay passionate and wanting to resign. I have posted the article in two parts, I hope that you take the time to view both.
Enjoy
Mathew: What encouraged you to keep going in teaching?
Rebecca: I think the fact that I see inspiration everywhere and it’s hard to… You just cannot get tired of a career that constantly refreshes you in an inspiring way. Like on the way, I just got back from Arkansas where I was speaking at a conference. And on the way there, I had this idea about how to tweak my classroom and police. I have a student in place who run the class essentially. And they perform a number of functions that free me to teach. And I started to think about kind of problem solving and conflict resolution. And wouldn’t it be interesting if my employees acted as kind of like a conflict resolution team.
And so, I’m excited to meet the kids every year. I’m excited to watch how they change from September to June. And I just love the fact that we could reinvent the wheel constantly and that I’m in charge of that. It’s empowering. So that’s what keeps me going is I’m empowered. And I have a lot of responsibility and it’s an important responsibility, so. A lot of people don’t have that at their jobs.
Mathew: What’s the most important piece of professional advice that you’ve received?
Rebecca: Well this year, I think… I mean every year you get something, some good nugget. But this year I heard somebody speak about removing themselves from the position of being indispensable in the classroom. If you’re an effective teacher, you do less so the kids can do more, and to generally be less helpful.
And that really hits home with me because my… the pride that I have in what I do and the way I do it is that I call my kids “can-do” kids. I want to create “can-do” kids. Those are kids who can do anything, that no matter what strange assignment they get from me or another teacher, that after taking a minute to reflect on what they’re being asked to do, that they have within them the knowledge that okay, I might not know exactly what to do but I have a whole bunch of skills that I could bring to the effort in trying. That they never feel they’re out before they started.
And so, this idea of doing less so kids could do more, and being less helpful and saying things like well what do you think you should do. What’s your gut telling you? What are a couple of things you could try? To put myself in the facilitator mode instead of the knowledge bearer has been powerful for me at this stage of my career.
Mathew: What are some of the, the ways that you keep your, keep yourself learning and growing in the profession?
Rebecca: I get really excited about the profession and what’s happening in it. And so, I just… that’s my personality. I think if you’re a true teacher, you are excited about what’s next for you. I pay a lot of attention to what’s happening on Twitter and in the education sector partially because I was required to as National Teacher of the Year, but I was also doing that on my own because I’m just curious by nature. I want to know what’s happening. And I really enjoy learning from other teachers seeing what they’re doing. I love to watch other teachers teach and I always get like ooh, that’s a good idea. I’m going to try that. And then I have to go like look that up and figure out how would that work for me because you can never just grab somebody’s great idea and drop it into your own practice. You have to internalize it. It has to get filtered through what’s normal for you and how you operate with kids. And you kind of blend it and shape it into your own unique thing. So that’s just kind of how I’ve been as a teacher in this career. I’m just really insanely curious.
Mathew: Can you spend a couple of minutes talking about some of the issues surrounding that and how you get balance?
Rebecca: And that’s I think you can’t avoid that in your first two or three years of teaching, is that it’s all-consuming. But then as things get easier, you start to realize what you can spend less time on. You start to decide that one or two days to a week or maybe more, you’re not going to take any school work home. You decide that you’re exhausted and you need some time to recover and to rejuvenate with friends and family, and hobbies.
And then as you get into like five to ten, you really start to become protective about your personal time because you realize that when you’re all just about teaching and class work and preparing, you’re not a very interesting person. You’re pretty dull. And you’re too wrapped up in the lesson to understand or even permit real life to come in which is really where the joy is. The joy is when your lesson or the idea that you have for that class period gets hit smack head-on by some new concept the kid brings up in class, or some event that happens in your country and is in the news. If you’re not open to receive all that stimulus, and have it blend with your lesson, you’re just another teacher. You’re not interesting, you’re not ordinary for kids.
And so I think in those later years, five to ten, you start to open yourself up to the alchemy of what’s happening in the world and the school in my life that can blend in with my lesson and make it more powerful for kids. But you have to police that perimeter and you have to leave yourself open for the universe to bring that to you. And if you’re just ahead in the computer and planning, grading, it’s not going to happen.
Mathew: What do you think are some of the significant changes that will occur.
Rebecca: I think that I’m very excited by the new teachers that I’ve met in my travels. They have a thirst for the knowledge of how to do teaching very, very well. That is refreshing. They also have… they want the profession to be professionalized. They want the respect that lawyers and doctors get. They want… they’re willing to work the hours. They’re willing to do the labor. And they want some of the perks and benefits that other professions have. And they don’t understand why we don’t have them already. There’s an impatience with the pace of transformation in the teaching profession that I think is ultimately helpful.
I like that, that kind of upstart nature of new teachers. And the idea that technology can help us get there faster is really exciting. It’s very compelling to watch. It’s not whole change or die attitude where if we can’t figure out how to do this better and smarter and faster with meaningful, long-lasting results for kids, well technology and other professions will find a way to do that and we’ll be obsolete. So we have to… we have to speed up how we evolve. So I’m excited about that.
At the same time, there are 3.2 million teachers in America. And the vast majority of them are good but could be quite a lot better. And if the country and the world is changing at the pace that it is, then these veteran teachers have to also start running and begin that transformation themselves. And that’s terribly hard for so many people to do especially when you don’t have the support and the money to finance it.
So that’s what… the positive, exciting part of it is the pace of change. And the evolution of the teaching profession is really exciting for me right now. How we got 3.2 million teachers in this country to a place where we’re all in sync on that is the challenge. And I fear that that we’ll lose quite a lot of teachers in the next ten years. Many, many will leave because new common standards are too challenging or budget cuts have led to a crisis in people’s lives where they just can’t afford to teach anymore. Or you know, other particular policy problems or initiatives that are too challenging. So it’s going to be a time of great, great change and transformation. I’m excited by that, and scared a little bit.
Mathew: Absolutely. Look, like I said thank you! Thank you so much for taking the time out. That’s all of the questions, but it’s just such a privilege to get to talk to you and such a privilege to get to just hear your passion and hear your heart for the profession. And it’s really inspiring and adds a lot of hope to what could be possible in teaching.