Good Morning Blog

This year I have made it a priority to stand outside my classroom door and personally greet each of my students with a "Good morning, Hope" or a "Good afternoon, Nick" as they walk in. The greeting helps each student know that they are welcome in my classroom and that I will do my best to provide them with a safe learning environment.

A few weeks after starting this, I started to think about how often I was uttering the words "Good morning" or "Good afternoon" in a given day. It was dozens. And then I started thinking about how many times I would say it over the course of a year. Thousands. Potentially up to 10,000 times in a single academic year. That's a lot.

I can't imagine that it is a bad thing for students to hear their teachers personally greet them almost 200 times per year. I also can't imagine that it is a bad thing for students to hear their teachers simply say the word "good" that many times. It just sets the right tone.

But then other things started to happen that I did not expect. Students who I had in class in prior years started giving me looks if I didn't send a "Good morning" their way. So I started greeting them as they walked by into their own math class. Students I've never had in class started giving me looks when I didn't greet them. So I started greeting them as they would walk by. I found myself greeting more and more students every day. And I could tell the students were starting to look forward to it. Other teachers started saying it to their students. That means a couple thousand more personal greetings this year. GREAT!

But there's something else that happened. Also something I didn't expect. Something that needs to mentioned. With most students, there wasn't a whole lot of difference between their face before I greeted them and their face after. Granted, you could see them enjoy their personal greeting. But for some, the difference was significant. That got me thinking. What if those students who look genuinely unhappy as they meander down the hallways had to fake a smile in order to appear happy that someone acknowledged them? Or worse, what if those students weren't faking their smiles at all? What if all it took for them to feel genuinely happy, even for a moment, was something as simple as a "Good morning?"