Dear Friends,
Ready or not school starts again this week. Teachers have been roaming around the campus the past week preparing their classrooms and their spirits. It has probably been too warm for students to start feeling the excitement of a new school year, but they have been getting their backpacks ready and their supplies bought. A lot of preparation has been going on and will go on in the days ahead.
In anticipation of the new school year, I thought I would give you some wisdom from wise teachers concerning a teacher’s focus as a new school year begins. While this is wisdom for teachers, it also has value for all of us in how we approach these days. These are taken from the Circe blog:
Grant George: “Start afresh—every year, every semester, every day, every class. Because the best teaching is simply loving what I love in front of my students, it is vital that whatever it is I’m teaching is fresh in my heart and mind.”
Greg Wilbur: “A good teacher needs to be consciously mindful of the souls of her students. This does not mean that you baptize every lesson with a scripture verse, but rather you take into account the spiritual formation of the students via the content and manner of what you teach. All of the disciplines of study either reflect God’s works of creation (the created order, numbers, cosmos, music, science, etc.) or His works of providence (history, philosophy, theology, people, and nations). The more you learn, the humbler you are in the face of all you do not know—which leads to wonder and awe at the Almighty and the works of His hands.”
Cindy Rollins: “I hesitate to say this because it sounds like a one-upper answer, a little too precious; but I can’t not say it because each day it is pressed upon me as the one habit needful for teaching. It is prayer. Prayer is a way of seeing. Education is a way of seeing. Prayer trains our mind like no other habit. Simone Weil says that prayer is the ultimate goal of attention. We can pray for wisdom and we can pray for our students, but prayer opens our eyes to see those things we might have missed. It starts out inward and moves us out of ourselves. The more we venture out of ourselves, the more we see how needful the habit of prayer is to the teacher.”
Peter Vande Brake: “Of course there are many habits that good teachers have, but if I can only talk about one, I will settle on curiosity. Curiosity renews a teacher’s excitement and joy for teaching because a curious teacher continually has new information to present to his or her students. There is nothing that a teacher loves more than being able to get a student excited about the subject matter that he or she loves and has made a career out of teaching. It leads a teacher to constant discoveries about the world and the Creator of that world. Curiosity compels a teacher to ask good questions about what he or she wants to know which fosters a sense of inquiry that the teacher can then pass on to students.”
Matt Bianco: “The good teacher will develop habits of provoking necessary questions from their students, rather than answering unasked questions. The good teacher will give students the opportunity to discover truth on their own, rather than dump truth on them. As David Hicks writes in Norms & Nobility, ‘Only the careless and unskilled teacher answers questions before they are asked. The teacher’s chief task is to provoke the question, not to answer it; to cultivate in his students an active curiosity, not to inundate them in factual information.’”
See, wise words for all of us.
Peace,
Fr. Damian