Sunday, August 5, 2018

Life Pass!

In my morning session, 'Talk Less, Smile More' at TMC18, Chris Luzniak, mentioned how he gives his students 'Life Happens' pass. I jotted that down among the long list of other great ideas that were shared during the conference. 

Last week was pre-planning for me. I was told one of my students just lost her mother 2 weeks earlier. That made me think of my husband who lost his mother the day before his freshman year. So life happens and sometimes it really sucks. At open house on Thursday, I met the student and her father. They told me the news and I almost lost it. 

All of this made me remember the pass that Chris talked about. I created a Life Pass to give to each of my students the first day of school. I know this in no way makes losing a loved one any better, but I want to be a more compassionate teacher this year. 


The idea is for them to simply place the pass on their desk as a signal to me that they don't want to be bothered that day. Maybe their parents were up arguing late last night, maybe they had a late game, maybe their pet died, maybe they overslept, maybe they were up late with a younger sibling because mom and dad both worked late. Life happens. At some point during class I will either initial inside one of the four boxes on the pass or hole punch it. This is my first time trying this, so my thought was the four boxes would be for a pass each quarter, but we'll see how it goes. Some students might use them all first semester and maybe I'll give them another second semester. If a student uses 2 boxes in a short amount of time, I'll have a chat with them to see what's going on. The pass can be found here.

The file has 4 to a page. When I went to make copies, I realized the passes would be quite large and might draw unnecessary attention from their peers. I ended up copying two sheets to a page, so one page gave me eight passes. I copied them on purple paper and laminated them. I'll give them to my students tomorrow when I see them. I'll keep you all updated on how it goes later in the year.  

Special shout out to Julie for suggesting I blog about this since my post on Twitter blew up yesterday. Thanks! So glad I can contribute!

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