My teaching attire has tranformed over the many years of education I’ve been in. When I was student teaching, I of course wore a nice dress shirt with a tie every single day. Mostly because I was student teaching in a high school and needed to look much older than the kids.
As the years progressed, I wore less and less dress clothes. My first year of teaching in Las Vegas had me wearing dress shirts a majority of the time. My time at RKMS was much the same. This of course changed during the pandemic where I obviously only dressed the top part of my body for on-camera instruction (even then, it was mostly just a polo I wore).
Now, as I get more and more comfortable, my teaching attire is growing to be much less formal. I still wear formal attire for the most part on Mondays and Tuesdays. On Wednesdays I wear a Builder’s Club T-Shirt for my meetings. On Thursdays I wear a UCSD shirt or sweater for college day. And finally, on Friday I usually just wear a Dale T-shirt or polo. Obviously I still want to maintain a degree of professionalism and seperation from the students, but as I get more and more comfortable as a teacher, it’s less about the clothes I wear, and more about my teaching persona, which I continue to refine each and every year.
Same, but in this case, true teaching is reflected in my soul.
