Last lap encouragement for all of you fellow teachers out there

With only a few weeks left, you may be feeling overwhelmed with all you still have to get done, or you may be excited to get done and start vacation, or maybe you're pulling your hair out because your students have already mentally checked out. Well, don't give up. At track meets I think that the most important shouts of encouragement from coaches come in the final lap, when the kids are stretched to their limits and would just assume collapse as make it those final few yards to the finish line.

Let this post be like that final shout of encouragement for you. During DEAR time, I'm reading a book on psychology by William Glasser, first he was a teacher, then a psychologist, then got his MD so he could practice psychiatry. He believed that everyone has basically two needs, to have human connections and to feel worthwhile- love and purpose, empathy and responsibility... "relevance and rigor."

Anyway, he felt that the most important job of therapists (and by extension parents and teachers) is to help people learn how to fulfill those two core needs without preventing others from doing so, in other words to become responsible rather than irresponsible. In order to do that, Glasser stresses that the learners have to trust that the teachers are there to help them learn how to become responsible.

As the old maxim goes, "they won't care what you know till they know you care." You people care. You give a rip. If you didn't, you wouldn't still be here in April, because God knows August through March wasn't exactly a cake walk. 

If nobody's taken the time to thank you for giving a rip, allow me. Thank you for caring kids, because I work with them to, so I know not all of them are easy to keep caring about. Keep up the good work, you're almost to the finish line.