Good Teachers

Today's wisdom comes from the Limen blog from a very thoughtful post titled Historic Community. It's part of her discussion on community building. Read the whole thing.

This is the bit that caught my eye. I am lucky enough to know teachers like this (and I hope you are, too):

It’s teaching without being patronising. It’s guiding, but treating your colleagues like the mature, capable, competent, intelligent adults that they are, and standing back and seeing how they solve things, not how you’d solve things. It’s being a resource, without doing all the work for someone else. It’s sharing the cool stuff, without competition or fear of losing your own value. These are people who *know* they’re good teachers, who know how many lives they’ve touched - but who also know they can always improve, and who were, up until the very end of the semester, both looking for new ways to teach material, to engage their students, to share their wisdom and knowledge.

...These are teachers who are very careful about how they spend their time. They invested incredible time outside the classroom in grading, designing assignments, or creating new courses. They spend their time thoughtfully: they’d rather travel to an interesting place, or see a specific, chosen film, than have the TV on or watch whatever the summer blockbuster is. They read in a way that awes and amazes an extremely literate and well-read community. They’ve been active in their community - in politics, in community service, in service to the school - in all sorts of ways.

I also recommend her posts on Seekers & Responsiblity.

Go well, stay well,

Sia

I love these candles with the different colored flames. They come from a store called More Than Light