Copyright © Louis Schmier and Atwood Publishing.
Date: Sat, 24 Nov 2001 07:55:42 -0500 (EST)
Random Thought: A Core Quality of a Good Teacher
It is a chilly, damp, wet, placid Saturday morning during
which I was struggling, really struggling, to think about a message early
yesterday morning. In it was a request from an education major at a
mid-western American university. She had been given an assignment (I
won't quote her descriptives of the professor)to contact some teachers
over the Thanksgiving break--as if they had nothing to do or nowhere to go
during this family holiday and were just sitting around waiting for a such
message--and ask them what they thought was the core quality of a good
teacher.
With a desperate "please be there," she asked for a reply as soon
as possible since she had to hand in the results of her survey by Monday.
She asked for a lot! It was not a good time to ask me to think. I am
here, but I am not here. My body was--and still is--being ravaged by vast
amounts of seratonin-producing tryptophan induced by a Thanksgiving
caloric overdose. Luckily, when I received her message all I had was the
lingerings of cozy turkey hangover. My digestive system still was softly
stuffed with stuffing. My brain still was in a sleepy daze. My muscles
were warmly sluggish. Still feeling the loitering effects of a near food
coma, my walk this morning through both the autumnal fog and my own drowsy
inner fog can best be described as an unsteady "hobble gobble wobble."
Anyway, I suppose there were many things I quickly could have
rattled off to this student that sounded good. To handle her question in
an insincere, matter-of-fact manner wouldn't have been fair to her. After
seriously struggling to think about the question and to come up with a
timely answer at such an untimely time, I came upon a clearing in my
cerebral fog. The conversation I recently had with Rita popped into my
head and I remembered what I had learned from her. I decided to answer
the student's request with this: most teachers only feel that students
have so much to learn from them. A core quality that sets the good
teachers apart from others is that they are students who learn so much
from students.
Susan and I would like to wish you all a belated, but no less
sincere Thanksgiving. We all have far more reasons than we know to offer
a humble, "thank you." And to my Muslim friends celebrating Ramadan,
Susan and I also would like to ask that Allah bring peace and blessing
into your house. Eid Mubarak.
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