1. The day starts early. Although I don't roll into school at 5:00 am like we did on show days, I do still get up at 6, like I did on school days during my show career. Instead of doing chores, I am off to clean chalkboards, sort papers, and straighten desks before those kids come in the door.
2. Stains don't matter. Every show girl knows that a stained shirt is never an embarrassment, but a badge of honor. The same goes for a teacher. Though black paint has been replaced by black pen, I still come home and find strange marks from a hard day's work. Just like show shirts stain fighter only works about 60% of the time.
3. How you (or they) enter makes a big difference. I remember my older brother giving me this advice about showing pigs: How you enter the showring matters. If you don't do it right, it will be the last time the judge ever looks at you. How my kids come into the classroom often determines how the day goes. If they come in rowdy, I know I'm going to spend a lot of effort getting them focused. That's why my bell ringer includes directions to "Work Silently."
4. Use your "look". Sometimes the difference between the showmanship buckle and just another ribbon is your "look" in the showring. Every showman uses some kind of inner mantra to get that right air of confidence and intensity. These days that look isn't sent towards the judge, but rather directed at distracted students who need a little reminder to get back on task.
5. It's really just organized chaos. In the showring you are watching a million things at once: The judge, your heifer, where you are going, the other showman, and the ring man. In my classroom it's about 2 million things: My clipboard, each student (doubling back for the ones who need checked twice), where I'm going, my lesson on the board, and the window at my door. Thank goodness I learned to answer questions while keeping control of a calf!
6. Tired feet are meant to be ignored. It doesn't matter how many times you've walked around the showring or across the fair in a day, when you have work to do...you do it. As a teacher, I've found Sperry's to be just as effective as they were at the fair, though it's worth the investment to buy a separate pair for the classroom, and leave the barn ones at home.
7. Know what's at stake. At the end of a day that didn't go my way in the ring, my mother would always say, "It's just one man's opinion on one day." The results in the ring were not how I determined my own worth. That's different from teaching. What's at stake isn't an award or some recognition, but rather the future. My passion for teaching grew from "A faith born not of words, but of deeds, achievements won by the present and past generations." I teach not for myself, but because I need the assurance that the future will be strong. Each day in the classroom is an investment in the most precious commodity...people.
'till the cows come home,
Ellie
