 |
|
|
Janine Logar
|
When Janine Logar first stepped into a classroom as a career-changer studying to be a teacher more than a decade ago, she remembers thinking, "Oh, this is what I want to do."
"I felt like when LeBron James discovered a basketball," she said recently. "This is what I was put on Earth to do. ... I'm not artistic. I don't find myself to be particularly good with finances. I'm a terrible driver. But I have a specific set of skills that really meshes with teaching."
What was your first year of teaching like?
I came in at a low morale point for the school. The week I got there, they'd been told that they had two years to get it together or they were going to go into turnaround. (State test) scores had just come out and people were crying because they were awful. It was a rough transition.
I found out pretty quickly that the kids at the school were awesome. They'd had some pretty checked-out teachers for a really long time. They'd say things to me like, 'It's nice that you always have lesson plans.' I was like, 'Yes but you should expect there to be lesson plans.' So in a lot of ways, they were like a little desert: They were so thirsty for rain.
What was the best thing about that year?
Without a doubt, the kids. Those kids were so patient and forgiving with me because I was a first-year teacher. Because we went through so much together, we were incredibly bonded. It felt so urgent. They knew the pressure was on them to try to keep the school open.
|
|
|
Janine takes a selfie with her students in an app that adds cartoons.
|
What was the most important thing you learned that year?
That if you don't have their hearts, you'll never have their heads. If they don't love you and believe in you and look up to you, you can move them intellectually but I don't think you make long-term intellectual connections with them. I don't think you draw out their gifts and talents and help them understand their uniqueness if you don't have a relationship with them.
How do you establish that relationship?
You have to treat them like they're people. Sometimes in teaching, we talk to kids in a way that is unauthentic. Kids need to know that you're a person. A big thing is to say you're sorry. Not, 'I'm sorry, but --.' But, 'I messed that up and it's going to take some time for me to fix that with you and here's how I plan to do that. Is that going to work with you?' Or, 'That lesson was horrible and how can we make it better tomorrow?'
Some of my tougher kids -- the kids on the class list that people say 'oh my gosh' about -- I usually try to reach out to them over the summer under the guise of, 'You can help me set the classroom up,' because it's not threatening, their image and ego isn't there, they don't have to perform for anybody. It's just them and I, and I can say, 'What hasn't worked with teachers before?' If they've laughed with you and picked music while you're painting the room and you take them to Cicis Pizza, you're going to start on a very different foot.
