A Teacher's Awesome Power

As we often times seem to focus on how powerless we are as teachers, I thought it interesting to read Raywid's article on the power that we do have. The power that we possess to teach in such a way as to encourage and support our students or the power we have to discourage and alienate our students until they feel as if they can't stand school anymore. “We know that people of any age may reject learning from and individual they dislike. It is also the case that they may reject learning from an individual they perceive to dislike them. One of the most frequent explanations dropouts give for having left school is non-caring teachers” (Raywid, p. 81). That last statement stunned me when I read it. Most children drop out of school because they feel that their teachers don’t care about them. They have not made an effort to become emotionally invested in their lives, so why should they continue going? It is truly humbling to know that we, as teachers, have that kind of power. It is also a little scary. We need to recognize this power and take responsibility for it.

I liked how Raywind pointed out that because we have this awesome power to influence our students education, we also then have certain obligations to them as well. We have obligations to each and every student. This includes the ones who disrupt the class, the ones who talk back, and the ones who just don’t seem that interested. We have an obligation to try and establish a relationship with them. To find out what is really going on that makes this student act out or that student disrupt the class. Many articles that we have read have pointed out that when other things are going on in a students’ life, the last thing that they are thinking about is education and learning. I think that we also assume that because they are young and not as “experienced” at life as we are that their problems must be small and that when they “grow up” they will learn about some real hardships in life. This isn’t the case however. Many young people today are going through some extremely painful and hard situations that we may never know about unless we ask. Not only should we ask, but we have an obligation to do so. Even if the student brushes aside our attempts to try and understand, we must keep trying. This is not to say that we should badger our students until they tell us, but we should continually let them know that we are there for them and that we care.

As standards and assessments are given more weight and we start to feel the pressure from principles and administrators to teach as certain way, we must always remember that our students come first. Even if we are stuck in a job where we have to teach to a certain curriculum, and we are bored to tears, we still have a responsibility to our students. It doesn’t matter if you have a strict curriculum to follow or if you have the freedom to come up with your own lesson plans, creating that relationship with each and every one of your students has to happen or it won’t matter how you are teaching. We have an awesome amount of power in shaping our students lives. Let’s make sure we are taking responsibility for that.