Inspiration from My Online Students

I’ve written so many blog posts lately about how to teach effectively, how to get into online teaching, how to work from home, and I’ve written quite a few more along the same lines over the past two months, but I haven’t posted them yet because I felt overdue to write something much more inspirational.

I was having a hard time thinking of a feel-good topic I hadn’t done before, and then it came to me.

I never write about the great things my online students do and say that make me feel great about the work that I do, which is a shame because the speeches they give can be downright inspiring.

I’ve certainly talked about the fact that it’s harder to connect with students online, but I’m also in a position (as a speech teacher) to get to know my online students better than most instructors, since they give speeches regularly during the semester, sharing stories about their life, and also talking about their passions and the things that impact them the most.

Every week I grade a number of speeches for one school or another, and I can’t tell you how many times I have to stop what I’m doing to text a friend or interrupt my husband in the other room to talk about a student video I just watched that has left me with tingles.

I just can’t go on until I’ve told someone their amazing story.

Sometimes their short videos leave me feeling so proud of them, so proud of how far they’ve come, how smart and driven they are (without even realizing it sometimes), and excited about how much good they want to do (in their own life and/or in someone else’s life). It’s even more exciting when I feel like I can see the path ahead of them, and I just know they possess more potential than they’re even aware of.

I’m started to wonder why it never occurred to me to share these stories, in some way, on the blog.

So I’ll start with this post, and I plan to do more posts like this one in the future. I’ll admit, it’s not always fun to watch and grade speeches, but I can’t complain too much about being inspired at least once a day by the words or journey of at least one student.

I’ll start by summing up a life lesson an online student of mine shared this week during her speech:

She started out by saying that she had been in customer service for a few years and that she couldn’t take it anymore- the frustration, the rudeness of customers, the hours, and the fact that it wasn’t her passion.

I expected to hear that she found a new job and life is much better now, but I was pleasantly surprised by what I heard next.

She said instead of getting a new job she decided to change her perspective and make it something she could enjoy. She said every day she made it a goal to focus on all the good aspects of her job- the fact that she could help people and even make their day significantly better if she put her mind to it, and it changed everything for her.

She finished by saying she now loves her job and learned a valuable lesson in thinking positively.

~

Honestly, when I started watching her speech, I was just going through the motions myself. I had a number of speeches to grade, I had myself on the clock, and I was trying to minimize the more personal and (technically) unnecessary feedback to students for the sake of time, but her story took a turn I didn’t expect and inspired me to start tuning into each speech to see what words of wisdom I could find, and to also start talking more positively about my job teaching online students (and not just my face-to-face students, who I brag about constantly!)- there’s just as much good in both, but it’s up to me to find it every day.

It doesn’t really matter what your job is, or what your responsibilities are, or even who you’re dealing with, sometimes a change in perspective can be all you need to make everything pretty perfect just the way it is.

Happy teaching, learning, and growing 🙂