Pivoting from Summer to Fall

See the author's half-erased name? That's intentional—I'm demonstrating the erasable sign I made for posting the book I'm reading!

 

It’s that transition time of year again for teachers and students: the bittersweet letting go of all the blessings of summer vacation to embrace the blessings of a new school term. I welcome students back into my class in 4 days, so this post is my personal exercise in that pivot.

Just a few of the summer blessings I enjoyed:

• Long walks along the sea wall with an old friend sharing family news, good books, and goals for the next year. We’ve gone to church together, had each other’s kids over for sleepovers, and taught each other’s kids. That kind of old friend.
• Sitting in the cabin with my husband listening to the roar of the waves and the shrill of cicadas.
• Books, books, and more books—both fiction and nonfiction, recreational and professional—and time to read them.

Some of the fall blessings I’m pivoting toward in expectation: 

Students: God’s image bearers, packed with gifts and potential. They will come with their own interests and strengths, needs and goals, which may or may not have much to do with my class. My challenge is to meet them where they are and help them understand their own potential and see how language is a gift for unlocking the world, encountering the ideas and experiences of others, and collaborating with neighbors to make a difference.

Language: I get to help those students discover all the coolness of language. In the Bible, God spoke the world into being (Genesis 1), and then the Word became flesh and lived among us (John 1). Language crackles with power. Even our human language can communicate beauty, explore ideas, create connection, encourage, promote justice; or it can hurt, discourage, divide, disempower, dissemble, dominate. As image bearers of God, people are language wielders—I want my students to understand this power, develop it, and use it for good. 

Reading: We will encounter the lives and minds of writers throughout time in independent reading and shared reading. In fiction, we will vicariously experience lives that are like and unlike ours. That will help us to consider who we want to be and to really “see” our neighbors who we are to love. In nonfiction, we will extend our understanding of the history, culture, and influences surrounding the fiction and informing our responses.

Speaking and listening: We will discuss what we read, pushing each other’s thinking as we share questions, connections, and evaluations. We will listen with curiosity, to understand our classmates. We will build on their comments with courage and civility. We are smarter together than separately, and we will collaborate to uncover all the intelligence we can. 

Writing: When we have an important idea, one we want to explore and share, writing will become a tool for clarifying our own thinking and for choosing just the support, the organization, the word, the sentence, that will most effectively express our thought so someone else will understand it. As we share our writing with each other, we will help each other refine our writing for real audiences, communicating with purpose, to make a difference in our community.

Pivot complete. 

Somewhere on social media this week I saw a poster that said, “Your one and only job on the first day of school is to make sure kids go home looking forward to the second day.” I think I’m ready to give it a shot.

How about you? How do you pivot from the blessings of summer to the blessings of fall?