Great Teachers Are Born, Not Made

I sat down with a fantastic principal. We talked about various things. She then said something that I wasn’t expecting. She said, “Rob, great teachers are born. They aren’t made.” I was taken aback. I had always been taught that you could go to college, choose a degree, work hard, and become an expert. She implied that great teachers already have it on the day they were born. But was she right? It took an entire career in education to figure out the answer, but she is right.

Take a minute and think about the great teachers of your life. I have been blessed with some great ones – my parents, bible study teachers, youth group leaders, missionaries, swim coaches, friends, colleagues, school teachers, and college ministers to name a few. They possessed this unique ability to impart knowledge and wisdom in a way that just made you want to gobble up every, last morsel. They had something in them that just can’t be taught. They were so good at their jobs that you often didn’t want to leave their presence.

I think the gift that great teachers possess is God given. We can hone their skills. We can teach them the intricacies of the learning cycle. We can have them do practicums. But when they get in front of a class and stage lights turn on, they can teach with the ease of breathing air. They were born with this ability. It is written upon their minds and their hearts from the basement of time(to steal a phrase from Norman MacClean’s A River Runs Through It).

My kids have a piano teacher who is just amazing. They will show up for piano lessons even when they won’t show up for anything else. They just enjoy being in the presence of a great teacher. She lifts them up and teaches them. Both of my kiddos achieved superior in their recent piano festival. They worked hard for those ratings. The worked for themselves, but they also worked for her. They wanted to honor the work she had put into them over the years.

Great teachers don’t have cookie cutter classrooms. In fact, they run from those environments. No more than Mozart or Beethoven would tolerate a basic music class in their prime…great teachers do not tolerate well environments which call for them to conform to weaker standards than their callings. Great teachers were made to make great music and not just bang out an easy rhythm on a keyboard. They are called to greatness. They are born with that desire.

If your children happen to stumble into one of their classrooms as students, just be thankful. Enjoy every, single minute of that school year. Every day will be a concert of remarkable learning.

When we go to art museums, and we come across great art…we stop and admire the work. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. The gradients of light in an Ansel Adams’ photograph. The intricate brush strokes of a Van Gogh. The smile of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Pablo Picasso’s cubism. They are masterpieces.

When children are in the classrooms of great teachers, students are witnessing a masterpiece each and every day that they attend school. Their learning is elevated. Their expectations of themselves is also elevated. They are lifted out of their classroom and into a realm which not many get to experience.

Sadly, we lose too many of these teachers in today’s public education’s stifling environments. Like many of the great works of art, we do not recognize their contributions until well after they are gone.

Something to think about today.

ProTip: If you have a great teacher in your building, set them free to do what they do best. Let. Them. Teach. Their students will be better for it. Maybe one day we can recruit them into one building and they can teach the socks off the drill and bubblers.