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When a Student Dies
No amount of teacher training prepares you for this
Over the course of my career, I have taken a lot of courses about teaching. I mean A LOT. My bachelor's degree, which I completed in 1987, was a Bachelor of Science in Education. Ten years later I completed a Master of Education degree. In the years that followed, I took an additional 20 semester credits in education-related coursework. This doesn’t even take into account the hundreds of hours of professional development workshops I attended over the course of my career.
We learned about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and how the basic physiological needs of food, water, and air need to be met before the higher level needs can be met. This theory states that once those needs are met, a student can then address their basic safety needs, their needs for love and belongingness, and their esteem needs on their path toward self-actualization.
We learned about Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development, where students over time mature in their behavior with regard to right and wrong. In time, the theory states, students will move from relying on external forces to compel good behavior to the internalization of their own moral code. We learned of Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development, and the contributions to public education made by Horace Mann, John Dewey, and others. We learned…
