A Note in Appreciation of Teachers:

Why We Teach
Being a great teacher is very challenging and rewarding work. You have in your hands the
power to influence and mould a student's mind. You have within you the capacity to instill in
the child a love for learning, to keep an open mind, and to keep questioning. You have the
ability to promote confidence, stir thinking, and awaken dreams...
All good teaching originates from the motive of generosity. To help others understand
history, literature, mathematics, or a language is the ground upon which all learning stands.
Fundamentally, education is the transmission of wisdom from one person to another. Indeed,
this is what great teachers do every day. They open their classrooms and provide guidance,
knowledge, expertise, and enthusiasm. Such lifelong service requires great passion and
fortitude. Many in the general public believe that teachers have an easy career. But for those
who teach, the unstinting physicality of standing and circulating all day in the classroom, the
ongoing preparation of lessons, and the relentless redesign and sequencing of instruction are
exhausting. With the immeasurable number of emotional interactions between ourselves and
our students, our benevolence is bound to flag. Fortunately, this is normal and cured with
some self-care.
A successful teacher is one who places a high value on students' culture, race, language,
gender, experiences, families, and sense of self or individuality. These teachers sustain high
expectations of all students, especially for those whom others may have given up on. They
stay committed in spite of predictable obstacles and create a safe classroom haven for their
students. By being resilient, by challenging the status quo of educational bureaucracy, and by
viewing themselves as life-long learners, they come to care about, respect, and love their
students. To understand your own motivation to teach, you explore your own history of
learning. It is a myriad of experiences, identities, values, beliefs, attitudes, hang-ups, biases,
wishes, dreams, and hopes that make teachers successful. It is only by mining your own
influences that you can begin to understand what motivated you to become a teacher in the
first place. So teaching becomes a career-long process of uncovering both your own and
others' stories. In the classroom, there is a high-quality feedback loop between the teacher
and the student. Teachers communicate both verbally and nonverbally to their students in a
back-and-forth exchange to get a deeper understanding.
Ironically, not all of us set out to be teachers. Many of us may have come to teaching from
other paths. Still, others of us were teaching our younger siblings in our bedrooms when we
were ten years old, and knew we were born to teach.
But, and most important of all, it was the influence of a great teacher who sparked our
ambition into a passion.
In brief, this is why we teach: to improve the transmission of learning, to honor the
scholarship we have so dearly won, and to inspire our students' compassion and ideas. In
these challenging times for teaching and learning, we must persist to persevere.

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A Teacher for All Seasons

Anonymous
A teacher is like Spring,
Who nurtures new green sprouts,
Encourages and leads them,
Whenever they have doubts.
A teacher is like Summer,
Whose sunny temperament
Makes studying a pleasure,
Preventing discontent.
A teacher is like Fall,
With methods crisp and clear,
Lessons of bright colors
And a happy atmosphere.
A teacher is like Winter,
While its snowing hard outside,
Keeping students comfortable,
As a warm and helpful guide.
Teacher, you do all these things,
With a pleasant attitude;
Youre a teacher for all seasons,
And you have my gratitude!