By Jessica Herring  of Wisdom from the Middle

I find that people are very concerned about change.  I don’t necessarily mean concerned in a negative context.  I just feel that people fixate on the idea of change and what that will look like, how it will affect them.  When we’re children, our teachers and our parents usher us through the myriad physical, emotional, and social changes that we will experience on our path to adulthood.  I get to experience the other side of that coin as I witness the changes of my seventh grade students while they battle through the throes of adolescence. But these changes are ever so slight and daily changes.  They may change our own personal worlds, but they don’t change the whole world.

As we come into the phases of adulthood, we tend to focus less on these everyday changes and more on the way our world is changing, and boy, does it seem to be changing! Sometimes, it can feel like we can have little impact on such a great big world.  Sometimes, it can feel like just keeping up with all those changes is good enough. But then I stop to think, is keeping up really enough?

As a middle school teacher, I spend my days with students who are in a very egocentric phase of life.  Whether you remember it or not, you and I were both equally selfish when we were twelve and thirteen.  It’s just a time in life when your own personal drama is far more important than whatever else is going on around you.  I try to make it my personal mission to pull my students out of themselves and into the rest of the world.  We spend a lot of time on social justice issues, both in a historical context and in the world around us.  I want them to understand issues that are pertinent to their lives, and I want them to realize that their voices can make an impact.  They can use their voices, and their writing, to change their world.

Right now, my students are writing anti-bullying speeches in the style of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.  Dr. King was one person who realized he could use his voice to change his world.  Several of the students at our middle school have come to this realization as well, and they’ve formed a leadership team to plan a Bullying Awareness Week.  Watching them “be the change they wish to see in the world” gives me great hope for our future.  If they can be social activists in middle school, a time when the weight of what the world thinks is exceptionally heavy, I can only hope they will grow into adults who understand the power of one voice of positive change.

I can’t just encourage my students to use their voices to change the world without modeling that same behavior.  I have to walk the walk, too. As a writer and an educator, I want to change the landscape of my profession.  Every day on Twitter and on the news, there seems to be a negative story about education.  Whether it’s a discussion about Common Core or a news story about an educator who made bad decisions, the general word on the street is that things in education aren’t going well.

The problem with this media slant, is that it simply isn’t true.  There’s a lot of good going on in classrooms all over our state and our country.  There are educators connecting through social media for professional development who are using their voices for change, impacting classrooms outside their schoolhouses and across state lines.  I want to be a part of that change.  I want to continue to use my voice to emphasize the positive things I see happening every, single day.  Making the choice to be unflinchingly positive may seem like a small step toward changing my world, but I don’t think it is.  I think it’s the first step toward a major shift in thinking in the schoolhouse. 

Jessica teaches middle school in Central Arkansas where she encourages her students to change their world for the better.  She lives in Little Rock.  Read about the work her students are doing and the lessons they are learning on her personal blog, Wisdom From the Middle.

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