~and we have to go there often~

In the days, weeks, months, and very few years that I have left to be a teacher, there is one message that I wish to relay to all educators out there.  It won't matter who you are, where or what you teach, or even if you have been in the classroom a few years or nearly 40 of them like me.  

The message is for you and it is for me as well. 
It is this.

You can be the best teacher there ever was.  Your students can all score exemplary on any state assessment they are given.  Hey, you can even be chosen the "teacher of the year" or the century for that matter. Your classroom may well be the most impeccably kept up place in the entire building with not a thing out of place.  The state standards can be posted all over the walls and memorized within your brain.  Yet none of this is as important as the one thing I find the most crucial in reaching all children.

You need to go where they are sometimes.
And you need to go there often.

I cannot recall the number of children over the past four decades who have come through my classroom doors with something on their minds that had absolutely nothing to do with my lesson plans for the day.  It could be as simple as being very hungry because they got up too late to eat breakfast or even worse yet, that there was no food in their house to eat in the first place.  Many a time there has been a sad look on the face of some child whose cat or dog had been run over or disappeared during the night. Too often it seems, students have lost close family members, folks who meant the world to them. With tears in their eyes, they only wanted to be able to tell me about it and how sad it made them feel.  They knew I couldn't bring their pets or loved ones back but they knew I would listen.  

That was all they needed.

As teachers, we expect kids to come to us every day ready to learn anything we set before them. We just kind of figure that our lesson plans are sufficient enough to provide them with what they need.  I have learned over the course of the last 40 years that it is not enough to provide them with.  There is something missing if we omit one important detail.

We have to go to where they are sometimes.
And we have to go there often.

I'm a firm believer in paying home visits to see kids and to interact with their families.  It's important because you see, the classroom is not the only place a kid can learn these days.  Only a foolish teacher would believe that children only gain knowledge within the confines of the schoolroom walls.  Some of the greatest of relationships between a teacher and her students/families can be built elsewhere.  It might be in the parking lot of the local grocery store or at the library on a Sunday afternoon.  You just might find it in a pig barn where kids are getting ready to show their animals on a Saturday morning or on the football or soccer field some Friday night.  

Going to where the kids are is sometimes not easy.  Perhaps it is even an inconvenience at times but that should never stop you.  I will always believe that if you really want to reach a child, to make a connection that will last for a long time to come, you simply have to do one thing.

Teachers have to go to where the students are.
And we have to go there often.

      The sunset was beautiful last evening near the small Oklahoma town of Wilson.