#MTBoSBlaugust - Day 2 - What is your mission statement?

We officially report back to school next week, but I plan to unofficially buckle down starting tomorrow.  This has been the first summer in YEARS that I have taken time off and not been at school most of the summer.  While it has been a great summer of getting a lot done around my house, that lack of school preparation has really stressed me out as well

One of the things on my to-do list today is to pick up my office so I have some workspace in order to get things done and sent off to the copy shop.  At the beginning of July, my office was a total pit and had not been useful for over a year.  Hubby and I rented a small dumpster and went to work on both offices.  Mine is mostly finished, other than some piles of papers that I need to sort through.  I decided to tackle a pile of papers that was on my side table today and ran across a document that took me back a bit...

About 10 years ago or so, I was invited to our school's yearly "advance", because at our school, we don't have "retreats", we want to always be "advancing". :)  I've gone to several of these throughout the 15 years I've been at my school and they are always awesome.  The teachers and school admin team work together to tackle current issues that are facing the school.  The teachers love it because they feel like their voice has been heard and the admin loves it because they get input from the teachers before making final decisions about the new school year.  Anyway, in this particular year, one of the activities was to develop a personal mission statement.  We were handed a 3 page front/back document of questions asking about the things we valued, who influenced us to be a teacher, what characteristics we wish to emulate, what we would hope students would say at our retirement party, etc.

Here is what I wrote:

As a professional educator, I commit to:
- Planning engaging, relevant, and interactive lessons designed to give students ownership in their learning.
- Work hard to help all children learn, regardless of ability or language level, employing a variety of methods to reach each child.
- Strive to have a positive attitude, modeling respect and caring within my classroom, valuing each student as an individual in hopes of encouraging those around me to be better people.

What I find interesting is how much I still believe in what I wrote so many years ago.  I have grown as a teacher since then through the MTBoS, but ultimately, the core of what I want to be as a teacher is in those 3 bullet points above.