Classroom Community Chapter 6 Valuing Hard Work, Team Effort, and Academic Success

Part of the power of being a teacher is that a teacher can decide what their students will value. The teachers who have students who are successful academically do so by following three values. These values are valuing academic achievement, hard work leads to academic achievement, and and academic ahcievement requieres teamwork. In other words, as expressed in the chapter, "This is important! You can do it! I won't give up on you!" What stood out to me the most in this entire chapter was that the messages that we give our students about achievement, hard work, and teamwork are so powerful in changing the environment in the class. This article was saturated with messages, slogans, chants, mantras, etc. that aim to instill these values about achievement to our students. I liked those offered on page 75 which are Academic Achievement=Opportunity, Climb the Mountain to College in 200x, Effort Breeds Success, Mistakes are Learning Opportunities, All of Us Will Learn, We Succeed Together, Team Beats Individual, Together Everyone Achieves More (TEAM) just to name a few. When I got to page 77 I started reading and then thinking about the idea that we have at Rocketship about reciting the creed every single day. I liked the suggestion about having the students write a slogan or message on the heading of every paper that stresses these values. At Rockeship it could be asking the students to write the core values or things like there are no shortcuts, Together we are all Rocketship Rocketeers, or Aspiring towards Excellence. There is no limit to what you could use. I love the idea of saturating the minds and attitudes of our students with these messages. Sadly I think many students are being brainwashed into accepting mediocracy or failure as the status quo. Fotunately, we have the power to "brainwash" them into believing that the opposite is true. We can inundate them with the message that they can achieve through hard work and team effort. We can show them that mediocracy is not the way. This may sound silly or corny, but I got chills while I was reading this. This is where we have power to decide change, and walk the walk instead of just talking the talk.