Papier-mâché

I'm two months into my first year of teaching grade 5, and I have yet to have a bad day. 

After years of teaching junior high and high school, where students are glued to chairs for hours on end often listening to lectures, elementary students have a much more palatable routine.

We: 

• Arrive, connect and celebrate. 

• Conduct short stints of focused learning, punctuated by movement, and snack breaks. 

• We enjoy physical education, recess, for at least an hour per day.   

• We learn practical skills in math and literacy and life, not yet confounded by deep theory or abstraction.

• And even better, art and music are a regular part of our routine.

That's why this week during our first set of parent teacher conferences, it was so easy to celebrate the great things about school. How refreshing it was to hear from so many parents corroborating the excitement their children are sharing each day. 

We need to inject this balance of fun, curiosity, and productivity into adult lives, because elementary school has figured it out. Heck, I even got to do Papier-mâché, for the first time in forty years, while preparing to lead another fun lesson. Life is pretty sweet.

• Now that’s a peak ethos.