For You: Dissenters and Resisters Swimming Upstream...

[teacher gal]

Ha...I posted the message here http://aplacetorespond.blogspot.com / at GD and it's going exactly nowhere.

Any constructive criticisms welcome. I'm trying my hand at blogging once again but need to build up some traffic there.

[teacher gal]

1. In the beginning, this thread

was selfish. It was negative. About the victimhood of teachers. I've done some soul-searching and the blog post is positive now, and most importantly, it is about the children.

Forgive me. If we are to affect needed changes, we need more positive messages and I've been one to rant on the negative since I began posting and commenting at the DU.

[Help_I_Live_In_Idaho]

2. Validation is internal

Hi, I am posting on my husband's name..so please endure.

I am an educator. I understand the struggle, the pain, and the lack of affirmation of our art. Parker Palmer, in the "Courage to Teach," said, "We teach who we are." What a profound and complex reality of the teaching passion. Teachers are not typically value for the unique humanity we bring to our profession, but by the standardization of a homogenous educational system that teaches to the test rather than teaching to the incredibly complex diversity of the human spirit,human mind, and human potential.

We teachers may never know how we touch the human spirit in the day-to-day activities of our classrooms, and of interactions with the human soul. It is all about our connections in which we dare to enter the reality, needs, and hopes of others that we find the beauty of what we call teaching and learning. All we can do is to give fully of ourselves and our calling to teach. In the end...regardless of how others interpret us, or value us, we have touched the human soul. Let not others state the value of these moments. Your students will speak of these moments in the entirely of their lives...and..in the lives of others. We are but pebbles in a great pond...and pebbles, however small, create change and motion in eternity.