I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.
Teachers
The poem ‘What Teachers Make’ is not without its detractors. This one person wrote to me and said: ‘Gee, Mr. Mali. You don’t possibly have a teacher-God complex, do you?’ And that was the first time I’d ever heard of that expression. So, yeah, I’m sure I have a teacher-God complex.
I didn’t learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems – dreams, myth, history – from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.
Teachers need time to engage with colleagues – whether shadowing, mentoring, co-teaching or conferring. They need a voice in school decisions and to be trusted as professionals.
The best schools tend to have the best teachers, not to mention parents who supervise homework, so there is less need for self-organised learning. But where a child comes from a less supportive home environment, where there are family tensions perhaps, their schoolwork can suffer. They need to be taught to think and study for themselves.
But in any case, I did poorly on the tests and so, in the first three years of school, I had teachers who thought I was stupid and when people think you’re stupid, they have low expectations for you.
Every man who rises above the common level has received two educations: the first from his teachers; the second, more personal and important, from himself.
Some teachers just have a knack for working with autistic children. Other teachers do not have it.
If you look back on all the teachers that you liked, I am sure you will find they were very entertaining.
Learning, while at school, that the charge for the education of girls was the same as that for boys, and that, when they became teachers, women received only half as much as men for their services, the injustice of this distinction was so apparent.