It’s interesting to think about the notion of working with
my hands, head, heart, and soul. I think the most obvious one is working with
my heart. It would be impossible to do what we do without using so much of our
heart. For this year they are our children, we care for them as we would care
for our own children. I think working with our soul relates really closely to
working with our heart. We glow with pride when they do awesome things and our
heart hurts when they are struggling. We carry them, and their successes and failures
around with us.
The easiest way to explain how I work with my head is to
explain that when I am teaching I am constantly evaluating how thing are going
and making decisions based on the evaluations. I always have a plan, but that plan
is constantly changing in my head as the lesson is going on.
Working with my hands is harder to explain. In middle school
teachers don’t touch kids. But there are times when a kids needs a hug and you
give a kid a hug and you can feel them just releasing all of their pent up tension and
frustration.
