To Touch a life and make a difference.....
Teaching is not an insignificant, irrelevant, paper-shuffling kind of a job. It has meaning, worth, and value. It gives you the opportunity to touch a young and impressionable life and make it better. We were the luckiest class in the school. We had a homeroom teacher who knew the core truth of education: self-hate destroys, self-steem saves. This principle guided all her efforts on our behalf. She always minimized our deficiencies, neytralized our rage, and enhanced our natural gifts. She never, so to speak, forced a dancer to sing or a singer to dance. she allowed each of us to light his own lamp. We loved her.
Mr. Jacobs won our hearts, because he treated us as though we were already what we could only hope to become. Through his eyes we saw ourselveves as capable and decent and destined for greatness... Mr Jacobs introduced us to ourselves. we learned who we were and what we wanted to be. No longer strangers to ourselves, we felt at home in the world. As a teacher, you will have a rare privilege and responsability: you can affect an change the lives of childrens. it is the basic nature of the job to guide academic learning, to help a puzzled and frustrated child finally crack the phonic code or discover patern and meaning in what were once the lifeless and unrelated facts of history. but the teaching of reading and history and other content areas does not take place in an emotional vacuum. Each classroom is a composite of the anguish and joy of all its students. students occupy psychological as well as physical space. There is the child in the fourth seat who seldom volunteers but who always knows the answer. You can feel the pain of her shyness. ther is the rambunctious one who spills all over the classrooms in a million random ways but is unable to focus on any one task or project. There is the "victim" who inspires taunts and even physical abuse from usually well-mannered classmates. There is the child who barely acknowledges yourr presence and pencil-taps on the desk in a disturbing and incomprehensible rhythm.
All of these children are struggling for self steem and for discovery of who they are and what they can become.
Mr. Jacobs won our hearts, because he treated us as though we were already what we could only hope to become. Through his eyes we saw ourselveves as capable and decent and destined for greatness... Mr Jacobs introduced us to ourselves. we learned who we were and what we wanted to be. No longer strangers to ourselves, we felt at home in the world. As a teacher, you will have a rare privilege and responsability: you can affect an change the lives of childrens. it is the basic nature of the job to guide academic learning, to help a puzzled and frustrated child finally crack the phonic code or discover patern and meaning in what were once the lifeless and unrelated facts of history. but the teaching of reading and history and other content areas does not take place in an emotional vacuum. Each classroom is a composite of the anguish and joy of all its students. students occupy psychological as well as physical space. There is the child in the fourth seat who seldom volunteers but who always knows the answer. You can feel the pain of her shyness. ther is the rambunctious one who spills all over the classrooms in a million random ways but is unable to focus on any one task or project. There is the "victim" who inspires taunts and even physical abuse from usually well-mannered classmates. There is the child who barely acknowledges yourr presence and pencil-taps on the desk in a disturbing and incomprehensible rhythm.
All of these children are struggling for self steem and for discovery of who they are and what they can become.
