This Month's Sales Report: What's Most Important in Education

     "I should be in sales," I say jokingly.

      I often find myself uttering that statement to people I don't know when they ask me what I do for a living. As an English teacher, I sell books every day to students who have no desire to read them. The job is far from easy. Do you know how difficult it is to get my students to like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or get them to read "for fun?" I'm realistic to know that some of you would say that I didn't succeed at either of those things this year nor any of the twenty years I've been in the classroom. When I first became a teacher, I thought that you, my students, would hang on to my every word. I thought you would come to class having read every book and be inspired by the assignments I asked you to write. But just because I enjoy being at school and haven't left it since my kindergarten journey began in 1980, (that's 37 first days of school, by the way) doesn't mean you, my clients, are enthralled by my English class.

     Years ago, I took it personally when I found out students didn't read what I assigned. That moment could have put an end to my sales career. In twenty years of teaching, I will be the first to admit my sales reports are not always glowing. I don't receive a monthly bonus for the books I do get you to read, but I continue to sell books because it's what I love to do. As students, you have become my clients and have challenged me in the best possible way every single day. Many of you want to take the shortest route to learning and earning that A. You live in a world that forces you to be driven by social media, where you abbreviate even the abbreviations, speak in memes I don't understand, and have phrases that read like a foreign language to me. You find it more convenient to write in terms of 140 characters as opposed to full blown literary analysis essays. My sales job of making English relevant and enjoyable is challenging when it's far more economical for you to watch the movie or read Spark Notes. Many in society would claim you, my teenage clients, are lazy, addicted to taking selfies, have no idea what REAL music is, and are self-absorbed. But you are growing up in a world that is so much more incredibly difficult than the teenage world in which I grew up. You have to decipher between real and fake news as massive amounts of information lie at your fingertips. You take the most challenging courses, complete hours of community service, play 2.5 sports along with 27 other activities, do hours of homework all to hopefully get into the "right" college. You have so many more pressures placed upon you by the same society who wants to call you lazy and self-absorbed.

     So if you happen to find yourself living in a world where you experience that pressure, I want to remind you of something today. I want to remind all of those adults who are quick to criticize teenagers of something to day as well. And if you can choose to listen to one lesson of mine, this is the lesson I want you to hear: Your grades are important. Working hard is important. Being involved is important. But so is being kind and compassionate. So is making a difference in the lives of others.

     This past month in my Theory of Knowledge class, Mrs. Leise and I challenged you to the Kindness Games--an opportunity to perform an act of kindness for a group at Atlee. I had no real expectations of how the assignment would go. Honestly, I thought you would perform your act, and we would continue with class, but this one activity stopped me in my tracks. Juniors created such projects as hosting a field day for the intellectually disabled students, honoring the music department with chocolate and notes of kindness, bringing the librarians a basket of treats, honoring Atlee's administrators, serving breakfast for the special education teachers, cleaning lab equipment for the science teachers, talking to a group of sophomores about IB classes, showing admiration to the PE teachers with a special video, and surprising the school counselors. Some of the senior projects included serving lunch for the cafeteria staff, writing notes of encouragement to the English Language Learners, making cultural desserts for the foreign language teachers, leaving notes of thanks for the maintenance staff, stocking the IB office with mints and other supplies for IB exams, baking cookies for your teachers, delivering bags of thank you notes to the history teachers, and giving dry erase markers to some of the members of the math department.

What happened when you did those acts of kindness on the day of the Kindness Games was a moment as a teacher I will never forget. You put genuine thought into your project, and in doing so, you surprised many people. You even made some cry. 

     We narrowed down the field to the final four and then to two final projects. We were honored to have Tamara Letter, a true ambassador of kindness who recently published her kindness journey in a book entitled A Passion for Kindness, as the judge for the final round of the competition.

Tamara Letter and her inspiring book, A Passion for Kindness

The winner of our Kindness Games was a group of juniors who presented a basket with specific, meaningful things to each administrator at Atlee. Dr. Wheeler received Carolina blue cupcakes and Dr. Pepper. Mr. Just received a football. Mrs. Campbell received a box of yellow items to radiate happiness, and Mrs. Allen received a donation in her name to the Special Olympics, an organization close to her heart. To see the video of the Kindness Games Champions' project, click this link.

2019 Kindness Day Champions

     As a teacher watching all of this unfold, I was blown away by the fact that you would come up with such meaningful projects. My only instructions were to perform and record an act of kindness. Mrs. Leise and I gave you no other guidance; there were no mini lessons or models to follow. Yet, I was the one who learned, perhaps, the biggest lesson. You might not want to read all of the books nor may you be enthralled by my every word, but you showed seventeen different groups on Atlee's campus that you are far from the self-absorbed, phone-loving teenagers that people set you out to be. You showed me how far kindness can go in a world that unfortunately stresses the value of intelligence and success over being kind.

     One of my first parent/teacher conferences as a parent proved to me an unfortunate event is happening in our education system. The teacher and I made small talk for a few minutes, and then she got down to business. She talked about my daughter's grades. My daughter did not have an A in everything that quarter, and the teacher sheepishly explained why, thinking that's why I was there. I wanted to know something far more important. "What kind of person is she?" I asked the teacher. The teacher stared at me blankly for a few minutes before responding. In the silence, I clarified my question. "Is she kind to other students? Does she make a difference in your classroom?" The teacher answered my question and then told me she never had a parent ask a question like that in her years of teaching; everyone always focused on the grade or the learning, not the soft skills like compassion and kindness. I guess I think this is where we've gone wrong in education. Success should not be measured by a GPA alone or how many activities you can manage to add before your resume topples over. Success should be the measure of the kind of person you become. When I first started teaching, I used to be a teacher who cared far more about the numbers--the grades in the grade book. I didn't see the bigger picture--what my students had learned and how they had grown.

     I realize now that no matter how much the world might seem to be about something else, kindness and compassion are what change it for the better. Of course, I'm still not going to give up on my sales job. Next year's students will read Frankenstein, and I will try my hardest to make a book written in the 1800's interesting and relevant. And I'm sure my sales report will come up short. Regardless, I will continue to acknowledge the world we live in is drastically different from the world in which I grew up. I will continue to remember that I am teaching students who will be in careers that don't even exist yet. (That concept is mind blowing to me sometimes). But I also will continue to teach kindness and be inspired by the teenagers I teach. Even when the world lets me down by misunderstanding them, I will remember these seventeen acts of kindness, smile, and be proud that my sales job introduced me to these clients.