Vulnerability Can Be a Strength for Educators. Let’s Embrace It.

Every teacher I know has had a back-to-school nightmare. We forget our lesson plans. We come unprepared, and students are depending on us. We make fools of ourselves in the very public setting of our classroom. And it’s the first day of school, so the students don’t know us yet. We haven’t yet established a connection. We’re in a room full of strangers—our new students—and we’re exposed as incompetent.

This is the traditional back-to-school nightmare, and I’ve had somewhere in the vicinity of hundreds of them (I’m the type who remembers my dreams, lucky or not). I recently caught a thread on Twitter from my edtech friends. It was all about those nightmares, which have now escalated to waking dread and feelings of vulnerability because of all of the current unknowns…………………………………………….