Passion

I could talk for hours about passion and teaching. Basically it comes down to one thing, if you don't have passion for what you're teaching, don't teach it. Passion can engage the most unwilling students and a lack of passion can turn away the most interested students. As teachers, passion is the key ingredient to both your (the teacher's) and the students' success in that subject. Just because you can teach facts and students can spit them back up on exams does not mean that they learned anything. It's our job as teachers to get kids excited about subjects and learn information that will stick with them and contribute to how each individual shapes their world views.

I have had lots of positive and negative influences from teachers that show passion and those that do not. In elementary school, I don't think i had one teacher that was enthusiastic or passionate about social studies. In all of my social studies classes, we would spend most of the time on that subject taking turns reading. Then we would inevitably complete a worksheet for the next day, which people would always just copy answers from the book. This caused me to dislike social studies a lot and I didn't like it at all coming into middle school and high school.

When I reached high school I took History and my teacher was the most boring teacher I've ever had, even in elementary social studies. He was even worse because he had a monotone voice, he basically had us read out of the chapter every day and watch movies once and a while, and then he'd get crabby if we didn't participate in discussions he led. However, his discussions were basically question/answer discussions, which I don't even consider a true discussion.

But then I entered my first year of high school and I took American History and my view of history and social studies did a complete belly flop. My teacher brought in artifacts from different time periods and we had to make a newspaper that represented the 1920's and I hardly ever remember reading out of the book. He held some great class discussions and got us debating about how some events in history relate to the present. I thoroughly enjoyed this class and it changed my perspective about history completely.

Other subjects, such as English, were also directly influenced by my teachers. I hated English in elementary school because it was reading and writing and worksheets. We never got to do anything exciting with it. But then I had seventh grade english with a teacher who had us journal every day and I remember that she would sometimes raise her voice so much that no one could sleep in that class. However, her voice raising wasn't because she was upset, but because she was so excited about what she was talking about. For instance, we were doing a unit on The Hobbit and A Christmas Carol and she would always get so excited and passionate about each of these books that I don't think anyone in that class would have dared to go against her because she got people excited about what she was teaching.

My most memorable professor with enthusiasm and passion was here at Luther. Professor Skitolsky from the Philosophy Department. I have never been so aware of someone's passion as I was of hers. From the first day of class i was perplexed by her. At one point in the year, she got so excited talking about Socrates that she threw her pencil, it bounced off of the ground, and landed right in the waste basket! It was not only very entertaining, but she acted like it was nothing and just kept almost shouting about how wonderful Socrates was! It was the best class I've ever taken and I don't think any class could ever compare and I know that it's because of her passion. I had no idea about philosophy before I took that class, but by the end of it, Philosophy became the essence of me. I know it was passion that made this interest possible.