To
me having a passion is having the ability to have a strong feeling of longing,
learning, and extreme interest in a topic. I believe that everyone has a
passion but have I have found hard is realizing what that passion is. What I
think has deterred me from finding my passion is the way I was educated. Throughout
schooling when I was young I was told what to learn and how to learn, and the
things that I was learning in school I wasn’t interested in. I was stuck in the
bounds of school walls and only taught what is in the curriculum. So you may be
questioning what is my passion? It may sound cliché for a teacher candidate,
but my passion is working with kids. Whenever I am with children and young
people I am at my happiest, I get enthusiastic and feel like I am at my best
creatively. How did I find my passion? Since my schooling didn’t give me the
opportunity to work with kids, I found it on my own exploring the world that is
available to me. I started falling in love with working with kids after
volunteering at overnight camp. To this day these were the best days of my
life, Camp Quin-Mo-Lac has taught me so much about working with kids and working
in the boundless environment.
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No
need to worry, there is room for passion within your classroom! This can be
done through examples such as Genius Hour. Genius Hour is one hour dedicated (a
day or a week) to whatever you’re your students find interesting. Each student
have the opportunity to choose their own topic that do not have any relation to
what they are learning in class; and they get to create a project any way they
choose to that they can share with the world. Students are given no guidelines
or timelines, but instead are given freedom to do anything they want to.
Teachers are only there to help facilitate and give feedback to students. Working
with their passions students is able to enjoy what they are doing, but they
also come across hardships while creating their projects. Even with these
hardships that they come across while creating because they are doing something
that they love to do make it worth doing it.
An
amazing example of a young person learning and working with their passion is Nathan
Farbish. Nathan did a TED Talk with Cheery Creed Education where he talked
about his passion of 3D printers. He describes passion as the thing that drive
us to work, and “passion makes work not even feel like work”, “it is something
we can loose ourselves in” in other words is that you do work because you love
it and it makes you happy and excited to do it. I love his definition of
passion because it really expresses how passion has a great power over what we
do. He found his passion because
owning his own 3D printer was something that he has always wanted to do but it
had kept on breaking down. This lead Nathan to learn how to fix and program his
printer, he enjoyed it so much because of the want and longing he has had for
owning this printer. After watching Nathan’s TED Talk you could really see his
passion for learning about technology and programming. His passion has lead him
to so many different opportunities such as going to a talk about the Programming
program called Scratch at MIT and teaching his own tech teacher about programming.
Like Nathan, students in our classrooms should have the opportunity early on to
explore their passions which can lead them to other opportunities out in the
community, where they can further their passion.
Nathan ends his talk asking the audience
what are their passions? I would like to further this question and ask
teachers, what are your student’s passions?
