Best Teacher of the Century Award: Your Mom and Dad
First, remember back to when you were but a wee one, maybe four or five years old. Or better yet, take a look at your four or five year old. What do you see? A copy machine, right? As you drive in the car, walk through the park, go on excursions and adventures here and there you see and hear the familiar. You hear your child making statements and after a fashion you remember those words and phrases as your own, even the one’s you’d like to not own up to. Even the facial expressions and mannerisms come back at your full force and familiar.
Going with our original example, now flash forward a couple decades or more, what do you see? Around the age of thirty, maybe thirty-five your words and phrases, and mannerisms become familiar, and for good reason. Why it takes so long for us to realize (or are these things time released?) that who we are hearing and seeing is our parents I don’t know. It is our mom or dad or both. We may hear them when we get mad at our kids, run into frustration at work, or even in the joy we express; it is our parents coming alive in our own words and actions.
Now let’s get to the issue at hand: best teacher ever, greatest influence in our lives.
Well, of all the dozens of teachers I’ve had through elementary, high school, college, into grad school, who do I remember? Who stands out in my mind? Some teacher I think of now and again as I learn and move forward in life? Not one of them. But there is one teacher who comes back to me time and again through the good and the bad and the ugly, for our relationship as student / teacher was never a smooth one, yet one of the most personal teacher / student relationships I’ve ever had.
It is funny to me all the praise and great value we place on school teachers, as if their influence and words will be remembered through the years. It is like a great conqueror who desires to be remembered through the ages when he is lucky if people give him a few thoughts a few times a year for all his bloodshed and efforts. Greatness is fleeting if it is sought after without the focus being on the giving not the taking. And the best school teacher is one who works in the shadows to the betterment of the student.
“A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary.” ~~ Thomas Carruthers
“The kids in our classroom are infinitely more significant than the subject matter we teach.” ~~ Meladee McCarty
“The teacher is but the catalyst, the poker and prodder, the tweeker standing quite in the shadows, a magician casting spells, the child thinking she has done it all herself.” ~~ Jeff Brown
“Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner; put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he learns and the way he understands it.” ~~ Soren Kierkegaard
But my teacher is one I remember, my father, for he was with me always. Little did he leave my mind when I was younger, and little does he leave my mind now as I achieve, as I come to understand it was the curiosity and imagination he instilled in me; the discipline he formed; the tenacity laid in foundation; the honor and honesty that keep me at my best; responsibility and sticking to the task at hand, all that he taught me, my greatest, my only teacher, that has enabled me to succeed at work, in public, and at home. For what school teacher is close enough to teach the essentials, the critical lessons of life, love, and home to make the better man the best-of-all men?
“The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions.” ~~ Bishop Mandell Creighton
“He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.” ~~ Joseph Joubert
“You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.” ~~ Clay P. Bedford
My father taught me those things no teacher can, things of the heart that are not, unfortunately, fiscally in demand but oh so much more important.
“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” ~~ C. S. Lewis
As the years go by, school teachers we’ve had over the years will fade in our minds, few if any ever coming to the forefront again. So if you want your child to succeed, if you want the best education your child can have to come to light, teach him all that you know and everything will turn out alright in your imperfect educational role, a parental delight.
“Spoon feeding, in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.” ~~ E.M. Forster
“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” ~~ Aristotle
“Children learn to smile from their parents.” ~~ Shinichi Suzuki
“It is the responsibility of every adult to make sure that children hear what we have learned from the lessons of life and to hear over and over that we love them.” ~~ Marian W. Edelman
If we desire our children to get the best education, then we must desire the best from us and to pass it on, to encourage and instill in the child a solid sense of self, character, responsibility, work ethic, honesty, honor, accountability, tenacity, discipline, focus and all that goes along with success, for if we don’t prepare the vessel and prepare it adequately regardless of what we put in it, that which is so secondary, it will not matter. For the vessel will spill over all that it has taken in and never achieve regardless of all the knowledge, ability, skill, gifts and desire.
It is time for parents to take responsibility for teaching their children and teaching them well all that they need to know to prosper them to the end of their time.
Teach your children well,
Their father’s hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you’ll know by.
Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.
Crosby Stills Nash Young — “Teach Your Children
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