News flash! The "Good old days" are now.

   I am confident that sometime in the future, a teacher is going to say, "Oh, I wish we could return to the good old days." Maybe we are living in the good old days right now and just don't realize it.

     I say this because every generation seems to perceive that the past was so much better. Back "then", teachers didn't have this or that to do. Back "then", teachers weren't responsible for this or that. I forget who said it, but time has a way of making things in the past more grand. A teacher in the early 1900s of a single room school house cleaned the chalkboards AND cut the wood for the fire stove. ONE teacher swept the floors, inked the wells, and still planned the lessons for students of multiple ages all in the same classroom. Talk about differentiation! I don't know about you, but I don't want to go back to the good old days of teaching.

    If we're the ones living in the present, what is it exactly that teachers in the future are going to look back on and wish they were us?

     The days when we only had to worry about writing SLOs?  The days where we had a common curriculum to work with? The days when you could instruct students face to face with good solid differentiated lessons and projects? The days when administrators would come in and observe our classrooms on a regular basis and give us encouragement and good descriptive feedback about our instructional practices? The days when teachers worked efficiently and collaboratively between buildings with cloud based documents?

They will say those things worked so well for us and we were used to them. Why all the change and confusion, and unneeded stress?

You don't get to choose the time you live in. You only get to choose how you live it.