Today was one of those crazy, long, whirlwind days where you barely have time to catch your breath but at the end of it you realize it was a day filled with awesomeness. for instance, I took my engineering classes outside today to launch the soda-bottle rockets we’ve been working on the past week. Some of my chemistry students asked if they could come out and watch since they didn’t have anything to work on. So they came outside with me and my engineering class and had fun watching the launches. At one point, I turned to look at my chem kids, and I noticed they had tied themselves up in a knot and were untying themselves. (It was the classic team building activity.) I could not have felt more proud of them at that moment. They chose such a fun, constructive way to use their down time!
Later in the morning, one of my sophomore chemistry students stopped to take a selfie with me (including an obligatory photo bomb by another one of my students) before she left with the rest of her team for their appointment with the patent attorney about their project. (Getting to their appointment was made even more challenging due to a plane crash on the interstate.)
Then after school today, I spent over an hour talking with a few students about life, school, goals, and so on. When one of them first came in my classroom, he noticed that desks were disarranged from an earlier activity and some supplies hadn’t been put away. He picked everything up for me and rearranged my desks of his own initiative.
This week, I’ve realized that high school students don’t celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week traditionally. I think this has to do with the fact that they didn’t even know it was Teacher Appreciation Week. However, by the time they reach high school, many students already have a great understanding of what teachers do for them. They don’t need a special week to make us feel appreciated. They know how to make me feel appreciated by the little things in the every day.