Ch 9 “Did I Miss Anything? Did I Miss Everything?” Last Thoughts

This final chapter of the book starts out with a story of a chaotic day in her classroom. This is a day where everything seems to be going wrong and it just keeps getting worse. We have students that are fighting in the back of the room, others that are sleeping, and others that are getting kicked out of their houses.  How do we as teachers go on teaching when we have a day like this? What do we focus on? The fighting kids, sleeping kids, or kids that need to be consoled. Do we just go on with our lesson like nothing is happening? How do we make these choices? What choices do we make when we decide to give up part of our lesson to help out a student with personal problems? Do we just ignore all these students and act like they will be attentive and actually retain what we are trying to teach them? None of us are perfect and we will have to make some hard choices when it comes to teaching. We have to pick our battles and pick them wisely. When we decide to punish or help out another student, how many students are we leaving to fend for themselves who are actually ready and willing to learn? Tovani states that, “ I can make good choices among all these options only when I have a clear purpose in mind.” With this in mind we have to ask ourselves what is our goal? What is the benefit for every decision that I make?

She gives a poem out to the students that is titled Did I Miss Anything? It talks about how students come in after being late or missing a day of class and ask ‘Did I miss anything?’ She says the real question should be ‘Did I Miss Everything?’ We as teachers should have every moment mean something to our students. We should always be teaching them and making every moment count. We have the opportunity to make a difference in these students lives. When a student misses a part of the lesson are they able to catch up and figure out what you taught them without holding everyone else back?

I really appreciated the last section of the chapter where she wraps it all up. It is titled We’ll Never have all the Answers. I really appreciated this section because it reminds me that we are all still learning and if we think we have all the answers and stop trying to learn we will be of no help to our students. They need us to always be on our toes and constantly moving forward with them. We can learn from them as easily as they can learn from us. Tovani talks about how a teacher had written a review on Amazon for her previous book and found another teachers review of her   book. This review said how she assumed that the book would give her a quick fix approach to her classroom problems and found instead that it forced her to re-evaluate her own instructional approaches instead. She said this was far better than a quick fix because there are no quick fixes and there is no one way that will work for every classroom.

This is the end of this blog. Thanks for reading and I hope you found my interpretation of this book to be informational and as good of a learning experience as I have.