Faith, Hope, and Love

Back in April, I had to miss two weeks of school to go to Nigeria and celebrate my dad's 70th birthday. Because it was National Poetry Month, one of the lessons was a throwback to a project we did during my student teaching days. First, the students read Maya Angelou's poem "Life Doesn't Frighten Me," and then write their own version of it. When we did this with the 4th graders, we had them "publish" their poems and created a class book with all of them in it. While I didn't have the time or resources to do the same thing with my 8th graders, a few of them gave me permission to share their poems here. Enjoy! Original poem by Maya Angelou:  Student Poems: Life Doesn't Frighten Me by Yancy D. Ghosts creeping on the walls Strange things at the mall Life doesn't frighten me at all. Sharks circling around Bad songs in soundcloud Life doesn't frighten me at all. A stylist cutting all my nails A barber cutting off my hai...

For work, we recently had to take the StrengthsFinder test. The test gives you your top 5 "talents" and those talents, plus knowledge and skills, become your strengths and can make you better at whatever you do in life (in this case, teaching). Doing this made me think: What if my students were equally aware of who they are and what natural talents they have because of their personality? How might this shape how they work in class? And if I am aware of their talents, how might I better relate to my students? Could it make me a better teacher if I knew both my talents and my students ? Well, we're giving it a shot. And so during the 6th grade Culture/Testing Week, one of the sessions will be about personalities. I'm not actually teaching/leading it, but I helped plan it and during that process we took a variety of tests to figure out the simplest version for 11- and 12-year-olds. We settled on the True Colors test (another version we considered and could be c...