Teaching is not rooted in Rigor, it's comes from the heart.

There something immensely evil in these education reforms demanding rigor, zero tolerance policies, endless testing, mad data driven instruction. These efforts to evaluate every minute of our teaching day, and the reduce children to strategic learning objectives.

Great Teachers, see the single rose.

French aristocrat, writer, poet, and pioneering aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's book 'The Little Prince' opened my heart to understanding where great pedagogy begins...it's not in the data, not in the methodology, it's not in the studies, it's not in the textbooks...no it begins in the heart, and a teacher without heart is no teacher at all.

Of all the misguided efforts to reform public education, the worst is the effort to close the teacher's heart. The effort to turn teaching in to something scientific, objective, data driven, and heartless.

“People where you live, the little prince said, grow five thousand roses in one garden... Yet they don't find what they're looking for... And yet what they're looking for could be found in a single rose.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

There is not a day that goes by where I do not find all I need from one single rose.

Great teachers don't see rows of children.

They see one child at a time.

Great teachers don't see test scores.

They see children.

Great lessons begin not in moving data points.

Great lessons begin in moving the heart.

Respectfully,

Dr. Jesse P. Turner
CCSU Literacy Center Director

If you like to listen to the song that inspire this Walking Man's morning walk today...it's Brandon Move Away by Judy Domeny Bowen  > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cructhdh-oQ <