Courage to Teach

Teacher talk about their sources of inspiration

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Teaching is a profession that demands a collaboration of mind, heart, and spirit. As Sam Intrator writes in his book Stories of The Courage to Teach, teachers "shape the world of the classroom by the activities they plan, the focus they attend to, and the relationships they nurture." But teachers themselves need to be nurtured-to be reminded that they are the vital keys to our children's success. They need to be told repeatedly that they matter, that they do make a difference. Instructor New Teacher has excerpted passages from Intrator's book that we believe illuminate the importance of teachers and the courage of heart and spirit that they bring to their classrooms every day.
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Clayton Stromberger
I have a basic problem with school. I am bored to tears when I am being taught "a lesson," especially one with an expected outcome. But when real life appears, I perk up and prick up my ears like my fourth graders. At teacher in-service meetings, I find myself wondering when the next break is and where I'm going to go for lunch, and then I catch myself and think, I'm just like my kidsand I get mad at them for doing the same thing!

During that last year of teaching, I wrote an article for the local newspaper about my experiences at Blackshear [Elementary School]. In it I explained why I thought I had become a teacher. I described how I'd always felt a sense of wonder about the natural world, especially the night sky, and how I'd loved pointing out constellations and planets to the younger kids in my neighborhood. Then I told of the one learning experience I'd had that had changed my life in a truly profound, lasting way-a summer in a University of Texas class called Shakespeare at Winedale in which I lived in the countryside with eighteen other students for two months, struggling to create honest performances of three Shakespeare plays. The class...gave me, for the first time, an awareness of my own voice and my potential to create meaning with others. In the article I wrote, "In the end, they were our plays. We did these amazing things we never imagined we could do. What a gift to give another human being."

Sometimes I think that's why I became a teacherto try to reach kids like myself who have some fountain of untapped resources just beneath the surface. And do you know which ones those kids are, the ones like me, with so much more to give than meets the eye or can be squeezed out of a test? It turns out that it's every one of them.
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Chip Wood
The more we are connected, the better our schools will be. Our individual voices matter, but what matters more is the gathering of our voices as we help each other teach with courage in our classrooms and cafeterias. To understand and utilize the power of our adult community requires courageous collaboration. We must take the time to gather with each other not only to honor our daily acts of courage but also to acknowledge our mistakes. If every day we help each other teach together a little better, we will increasingly be able to provide and defend for children the basic social and academic skills they truly need to become productive adults and caring and involved citizens. And we will all be the stronger for it. ...By gathering our voices, we model hope for ourselves, the children we teach, the parents we serve, and the policymakers we seek to inform. Our gathering voice is an old hymn of democracy's promise: "Lift every voice and sing."
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Leslie Young
In order to teach, I realized, I had to become a learner again, but this time in a totally new arena. ...With breathing space and the permission from loved ones to do what I felt like doing, the world began to move from black and white back to subtle color.... As my life outside the classroom expanded, so did the one inside. The students seemed to be more motivated, and so was I. I was able to take up my crusade of "creative insubordination" with new knowledge and flair. The moral of the story? To be a better teacher, don't be afraid to find yourself, even at the most inopportune of moments. As the sole constant in life is change, so it is in teaching. If teaching means to touch lives and at its best change lives for the better, so must you do so for yourself. Only if you learn what gives you true joy will you be able to help your students find what gives them joy.
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Susan Etheredge
Being witness to my students' creation of new understandings over the course of a semester renews, sustains, and enriches me. Their interpretations and creations inspire me to find new ways of seeing, understanding, and doing in my practice. For me, the aesthetic joy I derive from teaching is akin to the joy of creating.

...An African proverb states I learn, therefore I teach. These words ring true for me in my work, but the reverse feels more apt: I teach, therefore I learn.

....This is, in essence, what teaching is for me: trying all the different colors and shapes and peering at the world around you in these different waystrying out all the possibilities and sharing the joy. Sharing the joy of teaching and learning with my students leads us to find common purpose in our work together each semester. It is a conscious act on my part to share the joy of teaching with my students. I want my classroom to be a place of hopeful, uplifting conversations about teaching and learning

...I want students in my classroom to discover new ways of looking and seeing. Creating, relating, and seeking common purposes with my students is a philosophy of life, not a philosophy of pedagogy, that renews, refreshes, and reconfirms my earliest calling to the vocation.
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Excerpted with permission of the publisher Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Company, from Stories of the Courage to Teach: Honoring the Teacher's Heart. CopyrightÃ?â??Ã?® 2002 by Fetzer Institute.