Sometimes...

Most of my time as a teacher is spent jumping through hoops. I teach what the state says I need to, my students take tests the district and state say they have to. Some of it is important, a lot of it I think 4th graders could do without (Does a 4th grader really need to know the distributive property?). I also am often times put in a position that makes me have a classroom that is just like all the others: sit, don't talk, work on a worksheet. I can go a whole day and never hear or see the class across the hall from me, they are in their learning. Peek your head in their classroom... perfectly clean desks, perfectly clean classroom, perfectly silent scribbling away on papers. It is those times when I walk back to my room and catch myself starting to demand the same things. I get frustrated when I don't get the same results. And then I have days like today, when I stop and think we should do this everyday! It would have been hard around 11:30 to get to my classroom. You would have had to wiggled around 11 boys, huge sheets of paper, rulers, tape, notebooks, etc. These 11 boys weren't working silently, they weren't even whispering but they were measuring, problem solving, working together and creating. If you had made it to my classroom you would have seen every desk pushed up against the wall. Kids would have been working all around the floor. It looked and sounded like chaos, it was play practice for today. We still took a math and spelling test today (in silence). But I didn't have any kids ask if they could come in during lunch recess and do more math, I had 27 begging me to skip my meeting so they could come in during recess and work on their play. I love it. I love it enough to stop hearing the voice in my head that says every other teacher's room is silent and perfect and we should be like them and I remember this is how learning is supposed to be.