Please take the time to read this essay by Cindi Rigsbee, a 2009 National Teacher of the Year finalist. I promise it will rejuvenate your teaching soul. Cindi refers to Parker Palmer’s Courage to Teach, a beautiful book about teaching that I highly recommend because it touches on so many of the fears and triumphs of teaching.
Here’s a link to Cindi Rigsbee’s essay in Teacher Magazine:
Called to teach – I wonder today how many of our young teachers feel called to teach. Decades ago we talked about teaching as a true calling and a devotion to help others. We talked about needing to have the “fire in the belly” to teach. We emphasized that teachers had to have big hearts and an insatiable desire to help students. Today I’m afraid too much of that missionary zeal is lost in the paper shuffle of NCLB or state standards or country, state, district dictates about how, when, where, and why teachers should conduct lessons.
In his book, Palmer emphasizes:
In our rush to reform education, we have forgotten a simple truth: reform will never be achieved by renewing appropriations, restructuring schools, rewriting curricula, and revising texts if we continue to demean and dishearten the human resource called the teacher on whom so much depends (p. 3).
We need to find more teachers who are called to teach.
