This past weekend, I spent a few hours helping my future father- and brother-in-law opening their family's pool. This was a completely new experience for me. I'm not the first person that people think of when they need help with physical labor or mechanical reasoning, but I volunteered because I like to learn new things. Growing up, my family didn't have a pool. My mom occasionally lived in an apartment with a pool, so we could reap the benefits of having one. I just had never done any of the required maintenance to open one. And this work reminded me of what my students must feel when they encounter a new task for the first time. I offer a few comparisons between the opening of the pool and the learning that takes place in classrooms: Watch out for the spiders! Maybe there aren't gigantic arachnids in our classrooms, but there were in the pool. Asking kids to step outside their comfort zones can be scary. You won't want to do it, but the more you do it, the
Lessons from a novice teaching life