Hello Busy Educator!
I sat in the principal’s office. I felt helpless, emotionally exhausted and humiliated. The last thing I wanted to do was to go back to class and face my students. All I wanted to do was to quit. I had been teaching for three years. This was my second school. My career path wasn’t going well.
I got into teaching to make a difference. I wasn’t making any difference.
I couldn’t quit. It was my first real job. I didn’t want to disappoint my immigrant parents. I was the first person in both families to have gone to university.
And in six month’s time, I was getting married to the love of my life. I had student loans, a car loan and rent to pay. I needed the money.
The next year I was being transferred again, to a much tougher innere city school-my third school in four years.
My new assignment had me teaching French as a second language to 7 classes of 12-year-old students every day.
I taught every 12-year-old in the small village where I lived. Students and parents knew where I lived, where I shopped, what I did.
There was nowhere to hide.
One day, my principal told me that parents at the local curling rink were dragging my name through the mud. They ranted about what all the things that were wrong with my class. He told me that if my bad decisions continued, it would be very hard for me to live in the village.
Confrontations with aggressive, unmotivated and miserable students dominated my life.
My classroom management skills were horrible.
The bell dismissed my students, not me, the teacher.
As soon as the bell rang, students ran out of my classroom like an unruly mob. They ignored my feeble attempts to tell them what was for homework.
Instead of working on lesson plans, I spent time straightening all the desks and chairs back into rows.
After only 4 years of teaching, I wanted to leave again. I was burned out, stressed out and emotionally exhausted.
I didn’t want to ask for help. I didn’t know where to turn. I didn’t know what to do.
Ten years later the entire school staff, student body and parents came to a school assembly. They saw me receive The Prime Minister’s Award for Excellence in Teaching Mathematics, Science and Technology.
It was my 1st major teaching award.
I was to receive four more.
I had just written my first best-selling book.
I was being asked to speak at international teacher conferences.
After 29 years of teaching, I retired on my own terms.
I’ve also experienced much success with unmotivated, tough and troubled students. Justin, the most difficult student I’ve ever taught in 29 years, wrote how I changed his life forever:
“I was probably the most challenging student of Mr. Glavac’s “most challenging class of his career”.
Coming into his class in grade six, in a brand new school in a low income neighbourhood, I carried a lot with me. Like a lot of the 30+ students in that crammed portable, I came from a broken home, with a low income single mother stressed from raising 2 kids as a labourer in a local factory that laid her off more than gave her work.
I had already been introduced to drugs and alcohol via the local dealers who happened to be my next door neighbours. In twelve years of living, I had seen enough violence in my house, friends’ houses and my neighbourhood, to turn any young impressionable mind into a savage.
Most teachers would have put in for a transfer within the first week, but Mr. G took our class on head first.
Kids coming to school every day dealing with the above mentioned, plus some of them I imagine were hungry, and had illnesses, didn’t…. no… couldn’t be expected to have much of an appetite for learning.
Mr. Glavac recognized this and somehow came to see that the way to make us learn was to distract us from what was going on around us. He needed to find something that would get us so excited about doing it and what the end result could be, that we would forget what was going on around us, even if it was just from 9am – 3:30 p.m.
The way to do this was technology.
Most, if not all of us did not have a computer, and because the funding was so poor at our previous schools barely any one knew how to turn one on, let alone type essays and send them electronically over this thing called the World Wide Web.
Well, to put it frankly, it worked!
He did have a few challenges still however. Violent acts of rage and disrupting outbursts from me and some of the students who followed my still unfound leadership.
Teaching home row for keyboarding to the kids who suffered from ADD, and ADHD must have been hard also.
When I look back, I can see how from month to month, we were becoming less and less interested in acting out in class, and more focused on our new found task at hand; to research and type stories and then put them together in an electronic newspaper and send it to schools around the world.
WOW! Most of us had never left our neighbourhood, and now were going to be communicating with other kids from New Zealand!
And it seemed to snow ball from there.
Mr G sent out the word of what we were doing and all of a sudden we were being interviewed by CFPL News (our local network) TVO, Global television, The London Free Press, and The Toronto Star.
We were shown that no matter what was going on around us, if we put our minds to something, we can do whatever we want.
We only had Mr Glavac for one year, but what he gave us will last a lifetime.
And through it all, no matter what I did in his class, Mr. G never gave up on me and that in turn, taught me to never give up on myself.”
Teachers give to give, not to take. That’s what we do.
I can help you make a difference in the lives of your students.
You won’t have to put in years of struggling and making mistakes like I did.
That’s my goal for you.
To your teaching success,
Marjan
B.A., B.ED., M.A.
“Talk to each other, support each other, take care of each other.” ~ Stu Cunningham
P.S. Simple teaching tips and teaching strategies that are easy to apply to any classroom situation guaranteed to improve your teaching.
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