Love & Audacity

"Love, Energy, Audacity, and Proof. Cultivating love is really the foundation of it because, ultimately, love generates energy and love inspires audacity and love requires proof. As in, you can't just say I love you once every 30 years, you have to prove you mean it every day. But what I tried to do was turn that around and say, okay, let's make this into more of a road map for the extreme teacher."

--- Steve Farber

"Teachers should see themselves as being in the service of the people that they're teaching. You're creating the best possible environment for them to do the best possible work."

---Steve Farber

I like Farber's choice of words. He states that the foundation of leadership/teaching is love. Its a word we shy away from. It sounds too "touchy feely".

But love is the perfect word for what we need. Its the essential intangible... what makes the nuts & bolts work. To truly serve our students we must connect with the heart, not just the head. We've got to genuinely care about them as human beings. We've got to learn about them, accept them as they are, respect them as they are.

Comprehensible input is not enough.

I also like Farber's use of the word "audacity".... and really, love requires audacity. Because the traditional system is one that encourages dehumanization. We are told that to be "professional" we must be less than fully human. Supposedly, the "professional" teacher extinguishes their own emotions (or at least dampens them). The traditional teacher is encouraged to be "objective" and "rational".

But we are emotional creatures as well.... and so are our students. "Objectivity" is, in fact, a lie. Hard science now acknowledges that "objectivity" is impossible. There are no objective teachers or scientists. Every one of us is a participant. Life, and teaching, are inherently subjective experiences.

Rather than jettison a part of our humanity... we should embrace it. We need more emotion in the classroom... more caring,... a deeper and more human connection with students.

Dare to love your students and love what you are doing..... dare to challenge the factory-education system with audacity.