Leading From The Heart

by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.

Tag: heart

  • Know your stuff, then…

    …do what feels right.

    My practice distilled into one sentence, a sweet mélange of head and heart.

    Illustration of Hearts and Brains, Pixel & Light Design. Click for source.
    Illustration of Hearts and Brains, Pixel & Light Design. Click for source.

    This past week it’s been repeating like a mantra behind all of the activity – know your stuff, do what feels right.

    Stuff, of course, bears a lot of weight. Stuff can consist of curriculum, management, theory, school culture, student background, and more.

    What feels right is where the teacher becomes artist. This year I regained my own trust in the do what feels right category. I spent much of my year looking to others for approval and recognition as it was my first year in this position and I really wanted to a) do a good job (as defined by others, I learned) and b) keep the position. Only in April did I realize this, that I wasn’t doing what felt right enough of the time.

    Big lesson I learned this year. From my kids, from my colleagues.

    Have I mentioned lately that I wouldn’t change my job for anything?

    Know your stuff, do what feels right.

    I just happened to find a blog post, written in a much more scholarly manner! on the same topic by Penny Ryder, Unity of the Head and Heart.

  • What’s my lesson? (look right through me.)

    hello teacher tell me what’s my lesson? look right through me, look right through me. Roland Orzabal/Tears for Fears, 1982

    So my brother-in-law makes these videos of my niece and nephew, which I do appreciate since they live in Ohio of all places (that might have come out sounding wrong). The last one he sent had this beautiful piano music as its soundtrack – when I asked, he answered that it might be Michael Andrews, in an intro to a remake of Mad World by Tears for Fears.

    So I youtubed it and, indeed, that’s it. Beautiful song.

    I’ve listened to it a few times since I received the latest twins video last week, and only tonight did my mind make its way around these lines – hello teacher tell me what’s my lesson? look right through me, look right through me.

    In my last post we reflected on the human qualities teachers – we – bring to our classrooms. One of the strongest just might be the ability to both do and not do what this line is asking.

    G-d forbid, as teachers, we look through our students. Imagine being invisible? I’ve known how that feels. Like I don’t exist. That’s the part not to do.

    image found here, on the pbase gallery of backtothestart.

    At the same time, when a student arrives in my classroom she is implicitly asking for her lesson.

    She is asking me for her lesson.

    And if I look right through her, past her language, her colour, her attitude wrought from years of learned helplessness and strong wall making and straight to her, I just may be able to find the lesson she’s asking for.

    Maybe.

    image found here, by accident, at a Physics blog by teacher Dean Baird. I’ve bookmarked it.

    That’s the part to do. That maybe I wrote about? That is where my heart leads me.