Monday, August 30, 2010

The Idea

You quickly realize when you are teacher that the one thing above everything else that your students need is love. Many students practically cry out for it on a daily basis. And they all have different reasons. I've found that many of my students do not receive the love they deserve at home--which I'm sure is the case for many teachers these days. Even the ones who do receive adequate love desire to feel accepted and a sense of belonging. What better way to care for our students than to love them?

Toward the end of the school year last year I decided I wanted to try the Love Dare out on my students. There were a couple other teachers on board and we kept it up for a couple weeks and then it fizzled out. It really wasn't a good time to start the task, and I've realize that with 60-70 students, one day for a dare really isn't enough.

My plan is to present a dare at the beginning of each week. I will try to post it over the weekend for those of you who would like to meditate on the idea before trying it out with your students--but please forgive me if it runs a little late. In order to get through all of the dares before summer break, some weeks the dares will be doubled up.

I'm going to go along with the "Love Dare" book and tweak it to fit the needs of a teacher attempting to love those sometimes-not-so-lovable students (as well as those that are just easy to love!). My hope is to have fellow teachers post about how they are practicing each week's dare on their students and share how it is working out. I love to learn from my fellow teachers!

This is my warning that although I may be an English teacher, I will not always compose my sentences correctly, and I will probably get caught up in what I'm saying and forget to add punctuation and do a lot of "dot dot dot" and use some sort of improper English...forgive me.

The goal is simply to love.

Will you join me?