Saturday, May 16, 2015

Right school at the right time

Carol Ann Tomlinson wrote a piece called Notes from an Accidental Teacher back in 2010 for Educational Leadership. In it, she recounts some teaching experiences, both successful and unsuccessful. Her point is that not every job or school is the right fit for you at a particular point in your career and development. Here's how she explains it: "The places in which we teach shape who and what we become. If they don't feed us as human beings and as teachers, we atrophy. In teaching and in life, if we are not growing, we are losing ground. So a school, school district, and community need to be the right fit at the right time to fuel our professional and personal evolution."

It occurs to me, my school was the right fit for me when I first came here. It isn't any longer. It has become a stifling environment where the nail that sticks up gets hammered down, where individuality is feared instead of respected, and professional judgement takes a back seat to rubrics and metrics.

It's time to find a new right fit for me.

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