Tolerance vs Acceptance

I tweeted a thought I had earlier today the tolerance is temporary, acceptance is permanent and we should all strive to be accepting. I'm not sure why, but this thought has been on my mind for a couple of days now. I think of life in general and how sometimes we tolerate actions of those around us. Sometimes those actions irritate and annoy us, but we tolerate them in hopes that the actions will go away. 

In the classroom, we need to learn acceptance. A child comes in on the first day with all he/she is. It is our responsibility to accept that the child will have faults just like we as adults do and our responsibility to accept the child's faults and build on the child's strengths. To do this we have to build a community in our classroom. Make our classroom a safe environment. By a safe environment, I mean a place where the child feels safe to be who he or she is and feels comfortable talking to you as the adult. In this community, it becomes possible to find our the child's interests and the knowledge the child had before walking through your doors. If the child is active, instead of making him or her sit for long periods of time, you have enough knowledge of the child to add things in centers that will help them focus their mind and begin to learn persistence. If a child does not enjoy just looking at books, but loves blocks and boats  then add some books about building boats to inspire the child to look at books in reference (a skill needed in older grades) to doing what the child already loves. Being a teacher means to be creative in your thinking and teaching in meaningful ways to the child. 

These thoughts are my own and I constantly am reflecting and changing them as new experiences happen in my life and classroom. This past year was one of reflection and a lot of what I learned is in accepting a person as who they are and doing my very best to help the child, entrusted to me by their parents, learn in the way best for them which might or might not be the way I thought I should teach.