Daily writing prompt
What makes a teacher great?
I'm waiting for you guys to throw tomatoes at me, because I'm going to say some version of "It depends." But it really does! What kind of teacher are we talking about? How old are we?
When I was young, it was the teachers who took interest, who noticed and asked specific questions. They brought me out of my own anxious head and helped me believe I had something to offer the world. Goodness, I needed that so much! Hm, still do. Was someone supposed to finish that job?
With contemplative teachers, it's clarity of mind and deep interest which draws me. I'm not the available presence for others I would like to be yet, nor am I an especially attentive listener, but I do know directly what such a person is like. I'm thinking of those in whose presence I was hugely aware of everything I didn't understand, how far off the mark I was in various ways, and yet, didn't feel less-than personally. These teachers embodied the possibility of living a quite different kind of life.
Having three kids, I've been around a lot of teachers, through huge shifts in the skills and values of new teachers in contrast to the older ones. I was also on my way to becoming a teacher at some point, so was in classrooms constantly, enough to see what administrators were requiring and how little in some cases, teachers were supported. All the politics. It became about the numbers, not the kids. I wondered if it was ever about the kids or if I had romanticized that before. There were also a few teachers who affected one of my kids in ways that changed their entire view of school and sent all of us on a different and more difficult trajectory.
There's a lot to say.
But I'm not going to say much of it today. 🙂
You Begin
This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns...
Margaret Atwood
Have a beautiful Sunday! Please wish me lots of rain so that it's a peaceful day at work. 🙂
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