| Teaching is my chosen profession and vocation. This 2004/05 school year will be the first year of teaching at Louisville Middle School! I'm very excited! I taught 11 years at Angevine Middle School, and 5 years at Adams City Middle. I will love this new group of kids like no other. But, of course, that's how it is every year. |
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My Classroom What's Going On in My Classroom |
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Professional Development Teacher Recognition & Various Projects |
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Louisville Middle's Website What's Going On At Louisville Middle |
The question is often asked, "How can you put up with the behaviors of today's kids?" Yes, there certainly seems to be less discipline in today's students overall, as compared with my own schooling. Certainly an iconoclastic egocentric society such as ours has something to do with it. But the true power the teacher has, and my answer to that question can not be answered more eloquently than by the enlightened scholar Osho.
Osho was asked to attend a meeting of chancellors and educators about the lack of discipline in the schools, colleges, and universities. They were worried about the new generation's disrespectful attitude toward the teachers.OSHO Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic
He listened to their views and told them, "I see that somewhere the very basis is missing. A teacher is one who is respected naturally, so a teacher cannot demand respect. If the teacher demands respect, he simply shows that he is not a teacher; he has chosen the wrong profession that is not his vocation. The very definition of a teacher is one who is naturally respected - not that you have to respect him. If you have to respect him, what type of respect is this going to be? Just look: 'have to respect' - the whole beauty is lost, the respect is not alive. If it has to be done, then it is not there. When it is there, nobody is self-conscious about it. It simply flows. Whenever a teacher is there, it simply flows."
So he asked the seminar: "Rather than asking students to respect the teachers, you please look again - you must be choosing wrong teachers, who are not teachers at all."
Teachers are as much born as poets, it is a great art. Everybody cannot be a teacher, but because of universal education millions of teachers are required. Just think of a society that thinks everybody has to be taught poetry and poetry has to be taught by poets' training colleges. Those poets will be bogus, and then they will ask. "Applaud us! - because we are poets. Why are you not respecting us?" This has happened with teachers.
In the past there were very few teachers. People used to travel thousands of miles to find a teacher, to be with him. There was tremendous respect, but the respect depended on the student or the pupil. It simply happened.
My Poem About Teaching