Guest post from @MissL_Tweets on her shadowing of a @WaukeshaNorth1 student for a day

Ever since I’ve started working as a high school teacher, I’ve always found myself thinking,  “What would it be like to be a high schooler again?” My immediate thought is that of course I would be so much ‘cooler’ than I used to be, but when I really start thinking about it, I wouldn’t even be able to compare. High school today is not the high school that it was when I was a teenager (a couple hundred centuries ago).

During this one day of being a high schooler again, I ended up learning more about myself. But, through this, I also can transfer this knowledge to my students. Going through a variety of classes, ranging from Biology to Choir, I realized that I’m very much a kinesthetic learner. I need to be hands-on and constantly moving in order to be engaged. I know that not all students are like this and many are the exact opposite of this. But, admittedly, at some points I had difficulty paying attention to what was going on in class.

When I see students starting to doze off in my own class, I internally roll my eyes, and now I find myself looking at it in a new way. If I see kids disengaged, then I need to make sure that I’m engaging them, it’s really as simple as that. If something’s not working, fix it immediately. Make the students get up and move. Let them go and direct their own learning so they are almost forced (we’ll call it motivated) to work.

Will this work all the time? No. Of course not. That’s not reality. Every student at Waukesha North comes into school every morning with a million things on their mind and one of those things might be school. This may sound simple and condescending, and I certainly don’t mean it to be, but we need to remember that students are just people too.

As teachers, we are not robots. We simply can’t walk into school every day and systematically go through our lessons perfectly and not think about the outside world. Our students are the same way and we can’t expect them to be any different. Students are not robots. They can’t simply walk into every class and systematically complete all of their tasks perfectly and not think about the outside world. I find that most students separate school and the “outside” world. That shouldn’t be the case.

The student that I was shadowing told me this morning, “As I’m sitting here in school every day I’m thinking, ‘yeah, I’m here right now, but I could be in Disney World.’”

I’m not going to lie, I 100% relate to this statement. And with the risk of sounding incredibly cheesy, we need to make sure that we’re bringing Disney World to them. Take the time to find out what they want and make sure we incorporate it into the skills that they need.