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What makes a great teacher? I’ll tell you what.
My 28,000 one hour shows equal 5,000 kids in the audience over a 32 year high school teaching career. The playing field — aka, my classroom from 1977 to 2010. It was a great ride! We had many winning seasons. Really. I mean it. Never a perfect, undefeated season, but always in the hunt, always finishing with a winning record.
What was the magic trick? The secret? The ace up my sleeve? We will get to that shortly but first, gather around, huddle up, it’s about to become AUGUST 1st (a date that marks the end of ‘summer’ for teachers…sigh) and it’s time to have a serious gut check.
What makes a great teacher? I’ll tell you what. Endurance. Curiosity. Compassion. Selflessness. Humor.
Ah, I can see the doubters out there — the returning or newly minted teachers for whom the burdens of teaching have set you into a cynical spiral of despair. You’re down, and you are in one of two camps 1. You just blinked and the summer is over and you are starting year 1your second or third or fourht year or 2. You are sitting on your couch reading this and sweat is forming on your brow because you are supposed to start a ‘career’ in teaching in the next month. For the first group, your classroom experience seems like “Groundhog Day” (the movie) in which things that…
