When Someone Pushes Me To Do My Best

 When someone pushes me to do my best, I am usually at first slightly irritated. I am irritated because I feel like I am doing my best. I get more irritated as I think about it and then it usually makes me work harder. I start making better efforts to whatever task it is that I am doing. It is usually my parents, family, friends, and colleagues that push me to go harder.  I think about how my frustrations and irritations make me work to my maximum potential. 

I remember when I was in student teaching, my supervisor could not find anything to critique me on. She decided to knit-pick my lesson plans and the feedback I gave my students while teaching. My cooperating teacher saw how this frustrated me, but she gave me the best piece of advice that I take with me every day while teaching. She told me that sometimes that you just need to play the game to show off what you already know how to do. My cooperating teacher knew that I could create a strong assessment for a lesson and follow a lesson procedure. Together, for my final observation, my cooperating teacher and I worked together to create a lesson that would make it very difficult for my supervisor to knit-pick. It was a reading lesson with a great exit ticket for the assessment. I gave specific feedback to students while I did informal running records. The best my supervisor could come up with was that the students should not be allowed to layout on the floor while reading because they will fall asleep.  The amount of success that I felt in that instance was amazing and well worked for. 

I know for many students that I could be like my supervisor. I could be knit-picking them in the way that they follow classroom expectations or when I make them erase and rewrite their name when they add a capital letter in the middle of their name. I only do it because I want them to be the best version of them. That is what happened for me and I want to be able to be that person for my students.