Empathy the weapon to defeat apathy?

Wow, what a start to the term and a brief insight into the near frenetic pace of school life. With 4 new classes, the first weeks have been balancing the expectations with building relationships. Building relationships, which is a well established best practice for teaching, is going to be my main focus of the term really. How do you build genuine links effectively in a classroom with around 28 individuals, though my average class size is a little under this, in a genuine and sincere way that is not shown as tokenism?

Well here comes the silver bullet, actually this isn’t a silver bullet this is just my observation and also some work from the awesome Denise Quinlan who came in for a staff meeting followed up by a session with Greg Caroll. Listen authentically, this was echoed as a great way to build empathy in students by modelling it through John Spencer's podcast where he talks about learning empathy from his rescue greyhound. The freedom in Social studies is the curriculum is so broad you have wriggle room to dive into any area you see fit.

Currently, with the year 9’s the topic is called “Who are we” this looks at national identity particularly important this week after celebrating/protesting (delete as appropriate) te triti o Waitangi. We started with a look at the legend of Maui and collected the knowledge within the room before the traditional drawing of the steps this year I let the students have more freedom with this allowing them to draw it out or use a digital way of showing the story they also could find images and use them to retell the story. While they were happily busying themselves at the task it was the perfect opportunity to connect more with the akonga. You forget how much you do not know. Students were sharing stories about artists in the family the islands that their family come from and lots more. The value of that lesson was never in the content but the connections made and if I could possibly continue this through the unit I believe the outcomes will be infinitely better. As a year 9 entering a new school, you need to know you are valued and empathising with this and taking the time to learn from them is important.

Year 10 are a different prospect often with a confident swagger given there a year already at school, they may have preconceived ideas about you and the subject. This makes empathy an even more important tool but how do we balance within our classroom management. Our year 10 unit is called “Speak up be heard”. It looks at Human Rights and of course, it begs for the students to develop their voice. It has been great to see the students start to express their opinions, yet we still need to ensure there is equity in who we are hearing in class. It was very interesting as we looked at the United Declaration of Human Rights, some students really cut to the heart of the matter they said to me, “Why bother having this if countries ignore it”. The question was quite obvious but it floored me we ended up talking about money and how often that is valued over humans. I felt like the frustrated teenager I still am when looking at this topic, again I haven’t got the answers I explained actions we can take to ensure it is valued by governments across the world. The lesson wasn’t one that really fired though and I need to rethink how I can make this even more accessible for all the students. I really like the idea of student podcasts, imagine if we could somehow arrange interviews with lawmakers or people involved in human rights advocacy? There would be a lot of groundwork to be done but is there is a huge possibility for this through our new i-time. I am at the moment avoiding thinking about my power lesson that I will be rolling out next Tuesday across 2 different classes but I will get my head into the right space soon. The possibilities around taking a human rights topic and packing it into a neat package for the girls is both daunting and exciting. How can I ensure that my topic lights the fire that will allow the students are interested in a topic enough to potentially follow it up as an inquiry project? Watch this space.

Personal stuff, it has been an incredible start to the year a lot of it thanks to the tireless work of our senior leadership team (enough creeping Trickey), this often goes unsaid but the hours they put in are huge. I am adapting to being part-time the cleaner said to me it is really just like your full time as full-time teachers are well over time. The best thing about this is that I can ride my new e-bike into school. This simple act is akin to me riding a dragonfly to work it makes me so happy.

The toughest part of the week though was preparing my colleagues for the potential financial hardship we may go through if our contract negotiations fail. None of us wants to go to this step but now is the time to fight for our profession.