In order to take care of your students, you must take care of yourself: physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. The more energized and enthusiastic you are, the more this will reflect in the way you teach and interact with your students.
- Take care of your body: Eat healthy foods; get plenty of sleep; exercise regularly.
- Take care of your mind and emotions: spend time with family and friends; find a close confidant to discuss stressful teaching experiences; practice prayer and/or meditation to reflect upon experiences, reenergize, and asses your goals, values, and actions.
Here are some quick tips for relaxing and re-energizing:
- Find activities or hobbies that you like (sport, collecting, reading, going to plays, etc.)
- Go for a combination of beautiful scenery and physical exercise: go for a hike, take a walk, or go to the beach, or sit and think in the park.
- Look at teaching as more than just a job. It is an opportunity to make your mark on young lives and help children discover new ideas.
- Keep a “glass is half-full” attitude. Your outlook is more important that the situation itself!
Need a quick pick-me-up? Here are some short sayings about the joys and value of teaching:
"Treat people as if they were what they out to be and you help them become what they are capable of being." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Teachers shape the future…one child at a time.”
"I touch the future. I teach." -Christa McAuliffe
"No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit." - Helen Keller
"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." - Henry Brooks Adams
"Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers." - Josef Albers
"I cannot teach anybody anything; I can only make them think." - Socrates
"Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know it just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, teachers" - Richard Bach
"To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching." - George Bernard Shaw
"You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself." - Galielo Galilei
"If you need a reason for having sweet dreams, think of your best student. If you need to get out of the bed in the morning, think of your worst one."
"I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind." Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"We fail to see the child, just as one time we were unable to see the woman, the peasant, the oppressed social strata and opposed peoples. We have arranged things for ourselves so that children should in our was as little as possible….A child’s primary and irrefutable right is the right to voice his thoughts, to actively participate in our verdicts concerning him." – Janusz Korczak
He drew a circle to shut me out.
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win.
We drew a circle that took him in.
- Edwin Markham
“The most important observation you can make is when you become a glimmer in the child’s eyes and he becomes a glimmer in yours.” – Albert Trieschman
“Obedience is demanded to achieve a person with discipline. But this is a discipline that comes from the outside and works only when one is afraid of someone who is stronger than oneself. We do need discipline, an inner discipline to order our life. What is inner discipline? To my thinking it is the opposite of blind obedience. It is the development of a sense of values.” – Gisela Konopka
“Far from disheartening your pupils’ youthful courage, spare nothing to life up their soul; make them your equals in order that they may become your equals.” – Rousseau
"Education mirrors an oppressive society when:
(a) the teacher teaches and the students are taught.;
(b) the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
(c) the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
(d) the teacher talks and the students listen—meekly;
(e) the teacher disciplines and the students are not disciplined;
(f) the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;
(g) the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher;
(h) the teacher chooses the program context, and the students (who are not consulted) adapt to it;
(i) the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;
(j) the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are merely objects."
- Paulo Freire