Teachers are human

I’m going to make two controversial statements.
1. All teacher’s make mistakes.
2. Students absolutely need to see those mistakes.

I’ll give you a minute. Ready to move on? Good.

Now, I know that most teachers believe students will never trust them if they are seen as erroneous, messy or forgetful. Let’s be honest with ourselves. Not only is that four thousand percent untrue, but it is dangerous and hurtful to both us as teachers and it sets and unrealistic bar for our students. We make mistakes.

Seriously, I can count at least a dozen human-like mistakes I’ve made today. Small ones like forgetting to grab breakfast. Big ones like losing my cool over a dirty house. Granted, it is still somewhat summer vacation so I haven’t had a chance to mess up in front of students yet.

My point – as usual I do have one – is that we need to use these mistakes as role models for our students. Show them that we are just as human as they are. Embed them in your everyday teaching. After last school year, we should all know how to do that, right?!

I teach high school English. This school year, I will be returning to a ninth grade setting. So, the question is how to I embed my mistakes into the everyday classroom? By typing too fast and writing slower than I process information. This leads to errors in grammar, typos or fuzzy information. Over the last few years I have adopted a method to give students credit for finding this mistakes. The purpose is three-fold.

1. It shows all students that I’ve accepted my flaws. Granted, as an English teacher passing out worksheets with typos and missing commas, there are times I have to set aside a few minutes and discuss how to avoid errors in our writing. But, is that really so bad?
2. Students are given the opportunity to show comprehension of the skills being taught in the classroom by turning in an extra credit sheet.
3. Any person will put in the extra work for freebies! I have yet to have a student realize how much more effort they are putting into all the assignments in their effort to find those mistakes!!!

I’ve attached the document I use in my classroom below. Before school starts, I print this on brightly colored paper and hang it in the front of the room. This past year, instead of giving extra credit points on assignments, I found a stronger motivator. Students received tickets to put in the jar. At the end of the quarter, I pulled three tickets for $10 Whataburger gift cards.