![\"Chuck](\"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Chuck-Sandy192-150x150.jpg\")
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Last year when still working at the university I was working at then, I began spending my entire day sitting outside with students. My workstation was a park bench. I\u2019d sit there talking with whoever came, sometimes helping with homework, but often just listening to students as they\u2019d tell me about problems they were having in their lives. When it was time for one of my classes, I\u2019d gather my students together and we\u2019d head inside to spend ninety minutes in a traditional classroom. When class was over, we\u2019d head back outside and the learning continued. People would come and go, but I began thinking of that bench as the non-stop classroom. Great things happened there: thesis topics were discovered, new directions were found, hearts got mended, complaints got heard, and when one student we all loved was killed in a motorcycle accident, grief was acknowledged and shared. \u00a0I learned as much as I taught. The thing is, at that moment in my teaching career, \u00a0and for lot of different reasons, I\u2019d lost the support of most of my colleagues at the university and had no local professional community. \u00a0Looking back, I see those days on the park bench as one of the most rewarding periods of my life as a teacher. Still, I doubt I would have realized this as quickly as I have had it not been for the global community of connected teachers: people like you who helped me see that my work mattered.<\/p>\n
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Long ago, my teacher, the poet Cid Corman, modeled this kind of teaching for me by quitting his job at a famous university and taking up daily residence in a Kyoto coffee shop. Cid would sit there from 10 AM till 5 PM five days a week, welcoming whoever came to learn with a big smile followed by his warm, undivided attention. I was one of those people, and one of the things Cid taught me was that a classroom doesn\u2019t need to be in a school nor does being a teacher mean working in a classroom. What\u2019s important, said Cid, is community and feeling valued by that community. In addition to learners like me, Cid\u2019s community was the worldwide community of poets who in those days supported each other via airmailed letters. Those letters connected him the way the internet connects me.<\/p>\n
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I was thinking about all this recently when I came across an old post I\u2019d written for Eltnews<\/a> and rediscovered an activity I\u2019d done with my students, one where I\u2019d asked them to tell me about their favorite and least favorite classrooms and allowed them the freedom to say anything. Here\u2019s some of what they came up with that day:<\/p>\n In my favorite classroom \u2026<\/b><\/p>\n We get to talk about interesting stuff.<\/p>\n Everyone laughs a lot and has fun.<\/p>\n The teacher listens to me.<\/p>\n I feel excited and I learn a lot.<\/p>\n I\u2019m happy being there.<\/p>\n In my least favorite classroom \u2026<\/b><\/p>\n The mood is not good.<\/p>\n The teacher talks all the time.<\/p>\n We use computers all the time in a boring way.<\/p>\n It has nothing to do with my life.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t have any friends there.<\/p>\n Clearly, what was important to those students was not the classroom itself, but rather how they felt about being there. No matter where students learn and teachers teach, they need to feel welcome, challenged, connected, and valued. This can happen anywhere, no fancy classroom or even school required. What is required though is support from a community, and increasingly, the only support that can be readily found is from the online community of connected educators around the world: people like you.<\/p>\n Not long ago I got a Facebook message from a teacher friend in Syria letting me know that he and some colleagues had set up a school in a refugee center. They worked in the most basic of classrooms with learners living in the most basic of conditions. He wrote on his Facebook page that working with children there was like taking a course in innocence where the first lesson he taught was \u201cthough I live in the hardest of life conditions, I can still find a reason to smile.\u201d Although I\u2019ve only met this teacher once, he\u2019s an important person to me. Today, I learned he\u2019d been accepted into an MA program at a good university abroad. When I heard, I felt his joy.<\/p>\n Back in the 1930s my grandmother taught in a one-room schoolhouse where students wrote with chalk on slate tablets, sat on hard wooden benches, shared textbooks, and studied by lamplight. Still something magical must have happened in that room because when she passed away at 99 many of her former students, then senior citizens themselves, came to her funeral to tell stories about how what they\u2019d learned in that little schoolroom with my grandmother had changed their lives and how the local community was centered around what happened in that school.<\/p>\n Learning and teaching can happen in one-room schools, in refugee camps, at village schools in jungles, on park benches, over coffee in coffee shops, or in completely wired classrooms at the most up-to-date schools. It doesn\u2019t matter where it happens. It only matters that it does happen and that all teachers have community support. Today, the local community of my grandmother\u2019s day is gone. Today, that community is you, reading this.<\/p>\n If the sky was the limit, and it is, I would put far less emphasis on classrooms and focus resources and energy on teacher development. I would work to get all teachers everywhere connected while helping teachers everywhere understand that the work they do matters, that they are valued, that we\u2019re all in this together and that it will only be by joining hands and supporting each other that we\u2019ll make classrooms everywhere matter more.\u00a0 In fact, this is<\/i> the work I do, and it\u2019s why I work with iTDi.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Connect with Chuck and other iTDi Associates, Mentors, and Faculty by joining the \u00a0iTDi Community.\u00a0Sign Up For A Free iTDi Account<\/a>\u00a0to create your profile and get immediate access to our social forums and trial lessons from our\u00a0<\/b>English For Teachers<\/b><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/b>Teacher Development<\/b><\/a>\u00a0courses.<\/b><\/p>\n Like what we do? <\/b><\/p>\n Become an\u00a0<\/b>iTDi Patron<\/b><\/a>.\u2028<\/b><\/p>\n Your support makes a difference.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Making Classrooms Everywhere Matter More\u00a0\u2013 Chuck Sandy Last year when still working at the university I was working at then, I began spending my entire day sitting outside with students. My workstation was a park bench. I\u2019d sit there talking with whoever came, sometimes helping with homework, but often just listening to students as they\u2019d … Continue reading Thinking about classrooms – Chuck<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1908,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-thinking-about-classrooms"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/itdi.pro\/itdihome\/images\/blogimages\/Chuck241013-3.jpg\")
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In Indonesia, I met an iTDi member whose father is also a teacher. She told me her father walks jungle paths and across a river each day to meet his students in a village school with dirt floors and no electricity. Although his classroom has nothing, he works to connect students with the world, teaching English as a way out and forward. He believes that as a teacher, his role is to open doors that would otherwise be invisible to his students. His teacher daughter believes she can change the world. I believe it, too. She\u2019s now active on social media and is an edu-blogger. Daily she\u2019s empowered by the teachers she\u2019s met online through iTDi and elsewhere.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/itdi.pro\/itdihome\/images\/blogimages\/Chuck241013-5.jpg\")
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