Humans of BRAVE: Teaching BRAVE. “In my final year of college at UConn…
By: The Brave Institute
Tags: Bravery, Teachers, Values, Call To Action, Humans

Featuring Heather Norris

“In my final year of college at UConn, I joined BRAVE. Everything I had been doing up to this point was preparing me to follow my plan and be an English teacher. What BRAVE brought to me however, is everything that has been able to make me a better teacher for the young minds I work with. Therefore, I think my real story begins stemming off of BRAVE, because that’s where I was able to come out of my shell and enter into the person I really am, not the one I was hiding from. Prior to this experience, I was kind of going through the motions, just doing what I was supposed to do, but BRAVE had me put a lot of really real things into perspective, and having cultivated those ideals made me very self aware (in the best of ways), and my growth as a person really helped me realize why I wanted to teach English. Believe it or not, it’s not just because I love books. BRAVE showed me how I am not just a functioning person, but a really good person. I live by deep values and do my best to keep them true everyday. I do this not only for myself, but to be an example for those that I teach.

Everyday I try to show my students how to be a good human. Whether it is through small instances or grand gestures, I try to lead by example with the positive, and openly call myself out to them on the negative. If I can be as authentic as possible everyday, they will see that having that vulnerability is okay and safe in the space they’re in. As much as we want to highlight the good, we also have to accept that we’re all people and we all mess up, and that’s totally okay, life is a huge learning experience. Let’s embrace it for what it is. Bringing what BRAVE has taught me into a classroom of young minds has really showed me how impactful the ideals we uphold are. We are honest, we are authentic, we are embracing, we are risk taking, we are BRAVE.

Having recently graduated Sacred Heart University with my Master’s in Teaching, I’ve had a lot of time to examine why English is what I am meant to teach, and why teaching is where my heart lies. It is a subject dear to my heart not just because it is something I struggled with and overcame, but it was a way in which I started to discover who I was. I decided that I didn’t want to teach “how to do school.” I want to be able to teach an appreciation of learning, a desire for pushing intellectual boundaries (safely), and the understanding of how to exist and adapt to an ever changing world through the lenses of English Language Arts. It’s accepted and anticipated that ELA isn’t going to be everyone’s favorite subject, but if we can teach other factors along with reading strategies and writing techniques, students will have a greater possibility of finding themselves lost in, or through a book, or cultivating the story of their dreams, and having an appreciation or enjoyment of various forms of literature to carry through time. These aren’t things I realized overnight, and they aren’t always easy to implement, but I know that by believing in what I believe in, and teaching to the best of my ability with every student in mind everyday, there is a lot of hope in our future society.”

WHAT can you do?

Live to your own standards and values. At the end of the day, you need to be happy with you. Work to that point, define what you stand for. It definitely isn’t an automatic shift, but taking the steps to live the life you wish to in the ways you wish to is the biggest part of the equation.

As well, own yourself. Own your successes and tell the world. Own your failures and share what you learned. Successes should be celebrated, and failures acknowledged. Whether you took a risk, messed up a test question, or took a nap instead of cleaning your room. Failure means you tried.

HOW can you do this?

My call to action is spreading a more positive message about the world, to the world. What makes us so interesting as humans, is that we are all different, and we all bring different skills and attributes to our societies. There’s been a rift in the appreciation of this however and it’s become a crisis that needs some solving. It isn’t something to be done in a day by a single person, but through small actions and instances, it is something that groups can accomplish over great time.

We can all do this in the following ways: