Читать книгу Awesome Sauce - Josh Stock - Страница 23

POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS: Teacher to Student

What if you could start shaping your future students’ perceptions of your class before they ever set foot in your room? What if you could build up anticipation and excitement before the school year even starts?

When I was a kid, I had a few ways of knowing that summer was winding down. The first sign was our yearly pilgrimage to Walmart, school supply lists in hand. We would spend hours wandering aisle after aisle of tubs of crayons, shelves overflowing with crisp, clean backpacks emblazoned with superheroes, row after row of spiral notebooks with adorable kittens or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, folders sporting the greatest athletes of the day, and of course every Lisa Frank product imaginable, items spilling off shelves and littering the floor. I loved all of it.

Another sign that signaled summer’s end was the much-anticipated teacher reveal. I still remember being driven by my mom up the school’s circular drive in our maroon Safari minivan and walking up to the front door where the school rosters were always posted. My brothers and I would frantically scan the lists with a mob of other anxious students, ready to whoop with joy or bow our heads in dread as we saw who we would be spending 180 days with in the near future. Once middle school hit, my friends and I would pore over our schedules trying to track down any and all information we could about our new teachers.

Every year around school registration, my team and I release our welcome website, welcometosft.weebly.com. It has everything an incoming sixth grader could want. There are links to videos that might interest the students, websites and games for the students to explore, photos from previous years showing exciting things students might get to participate in, and a video tour of the building.

In this way, students get to see video interviews with each of the team teachers, administrators, and counselors. Students want to see who they will be spending most of their time with. I want them to know our faces from Day One. I want them to know exactly who to go to if they need help during those first few days of school. A name on a schedule doesn’t mean much, but kids are hooked if they see Mr. Stock talking about his class, hear the excitement in his voice, and find out about the spectacular things we might do.