Things I Wonder

14 years in.

I wonder if I can do this the next 20 years.

Middle. School. Social. Studies. Teacher.

My goodness.

I often wonder if I’m doing things in the best way…

• Am I challenging students enough?
• Am I meeting everyone’s needs?
• Do my policies fall in line with school-wide policies?
• Is it a bad practice that I accept work anytime without a late penalty?
• Is it bad practice that I let a certain student sleep in class because they need to?
• Is it bad practice that I don’t keep track of tardies and simply say, “Glad you’re here?”
• Is it wrong that I hand out candy just because I want to? Should I only save it for a reward?
• Is it bad practice that I refuse to use a textbook and hodgepodge my own stuff together?
• Should I fall in line and lecture more? Use more worksheets? Use a more structured way of teaching?
• I wonder if I’m too far outside the norm, or if the norm just isn’t what’s best for kids.
• I wonder if I should care more about test scores or if the real success lies in the moments when a kid says, “That actually makes sense now.”
• I wonder if the things I let slide—like a kid putting their head down because they didn’t sleep the night before—are the things they’ll remember most about my class.
• I wonder if my flexibility in deadlines is preparing them for the real world or if I’m just making their lives a little easier because I know life is already hard enough.
• I wonder if some of the things I do that aren’t “best practice” are actually the best practices for the kids in my room.I wonder if the lesson I spent hours planning will even land the way I hope it will—or if the thing they’ll remember is the random conversation about history that had nothing to do with my slides.
• I wonder if I should stop worrying so much about whether what I do fits into a neat little box and just keep focusing on what works.

Because at the end of the day, I wonder if the real question isn’t “Am I doing this the right way?” but instead “Am I doing right by my students?”

And as long as the answer is yes, I think I’ll keep going.