Do you remember why you wanted to be a teacher in the first place?
Maybe you wanted to follow in someone’s footsteps. Maybe you wanted summers off. But my guess is that you wanted to make a difference somehow; you wanted to inspire someone along the way to do something great in his or her life.
That’s something I always longed for. Past the fun it would be to write on a chalkboard and organize materials, past the projects I could assign and songs I could sing with students, I wanted to inspire students to reach for their goals and find their passions. Mostly, I wanted to them to love learning.
I’d like to think I’ve done that for at least one or two students so far in my fourteen years of teaching. (Sometimes you just never know how many lives you truly touch.) Regardless, inspiring my students is still my main objective in the classroom, even on the off days and stressful weeks (like these ones leading up to our state testing.)
And so – I bring you Be Inspiring Day!
This month, many schools and district celebrate teachers through a variety of teacher appreciation activities. At The Inspired Classroom, we are celebrating the inspiring quality of teachers by instituting a Be Inspiring Day. On or around May 15th, do something to ignite that flame inside your students: share something you love with them, do a creative project with them, listen to music or write poetry from the heart. Invite them to share something of value with you and their classmates, challenge them to do something that truly interests them. Inspire your students to do great things, dig deep into a concept or explore something new.
Sound like something you might want to try? Great! You can pledge to Be Inspiring by going to our Be Inspiring page and adding to the comments.
Want some ideas of what to do? Join us on Twitter as we chat about how we teachers can Be Inspiring to our students by following our hashtag #BInspiring and by joining in on a Twitter chat or two.
- Our first Twitter chat is scheduled for TONIGHT, Wednesday, May 1st when I will be co-moderating with @teachingwthsoul on #ntchat. Come join the conversation and get ideas about what it means to be inspiring for new teachers and how to inspire students!
- The next Twitter chat is scheduled for Monday, May 6th on #4thchat. You don’t have to be a fourth grade teacher to join in on the conversation, just an educator who wants to Be Inspiring!
I hope you join me in this fun project to keep the momentum of the last weeks of school going. So go PLEDGE now and Be Inspiring!
~EMP
