A Successful Teacher Needs a Short Memory

Top ten lists of top ten teacher attributes are usually predictable. We should be technologically savvy. We should be student focused, positive in the classroom, creative with lesson plans, immediate in email response. We should be detailed of planning (but not too much), spontaneous (but not too much), brave, clean, and reverend (oh, the last three were from the Boy Scout handbook, but they seemed appropriate, though predictable). You could pop this list into a hermetically-sealed silver envelope and use the contents in a mind-reading game during an ice-breaker at an education conference.

But, I came across an attribute recently in a Twitter feed that would not have been found in that envelope. The idea came from an October article titled "What You Owe Your Students." What do you owe them? A short memory, according to Terry Heick, director of currriculum at the Internet site, TeachThought. That idea intrigued me and, on second consideration, seemed quite accurate. Why does a teacher need short term memory? There are many reasons.

You need short term memory so you can proactively encourage a student who an hour earlier could be heard complaining about your teaching to a classmate just outside your office door. Teaching focuses on the student, not on your pride.

You need short term memory so students always surprise you, even if you are delivering the same exercise with the same answers to the fourth class that week. The content is new to the students, though you may have been planning it since last summer.

You need short term memory so you can focus on the class in front of you, not on the unfulfilled requests for supplies, texts, training, or assistance that are stored in the sent folder on your email account.

You need short term memory so as you turn to a new worksheet, assignment, project, paper, or PowerPoint, you judge the material on its own merit and do not compare it to work that you have just downgraded or praised from their classmates.

You need a short term memory so each semester you come back to the classroom refreshed, reinvigorated, ready to successfully teach verb tenses to this new class. This semester, the students will love to work on grammar exercises.

You need a short term memory so you can do the work your truly love, in the inspirational power of the moment, with the students and staff you truly enjoy working with. If it wasn't for a short memory, the rest of the attributes wouldn't really matter, would they?