Entry based on the book.

Based on the book "The courage to teach"

I.       Write a personal statement trying to express what is at the heart of your life as a future teacher.  Consider the following questions: Why do I want to become a teacher? What do I stand for as a student teacher?  What do I want my legacy as a teacher to be? What can I do to keep track of myself, to “remember” my own heart? When did you first realize that you wanted to be a teacher? What were the circumstances of this realization? How close are you to those feelings today?

"The power of knowing to teach is in the power of knowing to learn, my dream of becoming a teacher  is based on the wish of helping others to find out their own ways of learning, teachers are models to follow up and their legacy must be education, orientation, and values as a mark he or she left in students' lives. Also a teacher keeps in mind his or her objectives crearly". 

I remember when I realised that I wanted to become a teacher, a teacher was the person who inspired me to be like him. He was an English teacher, and he left a good legacy  in my life. That was why I decided to try it.

I feel that I am closer to those feelings of loving teaching, loving what I do, loving helping people, and loving creating new things.



II.      Palmer writes: “ My ability to connect with my students and to connect them with the subject, depends less on the methods I use than on the degree to which I know and trust my selfhood—and I am willing to make it available and vulnerable in the service of learning” (p.10). What does it mean to rely on your selfhood rather than methods?

In my opinion, there are some teachers who think  that methods make a class effective. The point is that a lot of teachers do not connect the students with the subject they are teaching because they do not know how to do it. They trust on the techniques than in their selfhood because they are afraid of what the students are going to say about them, and what they are going to think about their personality.  Those teachers do not feel free and comfortable during teaching classes, and they do not feel confident without using a method, they are really worried about it that they forget the students' needs, they are only thinking in the performance they are going to do in class that they do not remember taking into account the students' feelings, interests, and so on.

It is very important that, we as teachers learn to listen the feedback from our students about our performance in classes to improve our own teaching style, and go back to see what we did wrong to change it, and do it again differently.

In some cases, we imagine that when using a method, the class will be successful, but when we realize that it does not work, we feel as we are in the death zone. That is whay we do not have to trust on the methods we use than on the ability we have to connect our students.



III.    Reflect on your earliest encounters with teaching.  If you are drawn to teaching, when did you first feel drawn to it? What was it that drew you? What within you was evoked by teaching—its values, its methods, the way it names and frames reality? What does the nature of teaching reveal about who you are? If you aren’t, share a story about one of your favorite teachers.  What do you recall most vividly about that teacher? What was his / her relation to the subject taught? What was the ethos of his/ her classroom?

My earliest encoynters with teaching were when I was in ninth grade, an excellent English teacher inspired me to study for being an English teacher, and since that happened, I started to ask about teaching specially English because English was my favorite subject. What drew me about teaching was that I can transmit my knowledge, and say that because there are a lot of persons who do know many things and have several things in their minds, but they do not share their knowledge with nobody. Sometimes, I ask some things that I do not know, and it is really horrible when I know that a person has the answer to my doubt and he or she does not let me know it. That kind of person is selfish, that is why I wanted to learn and then to teach what I learnt for helping others to know new things, and encourage them to help others facilitating the knowledge they have. In fact, I liked teaching since I had a lot of doubts, and I wanted to know their answers. So,  I liked teaching since I wanted to learn, since I decided to build my own learning, and share it.

I believe that, the values and methods of teaching were avoked within me because we can apply methods in our classes sharing knowledge without neglecting the values such as respect, ethic, moral, etc., for teaching students how to live and deal with problems.

Also, what I remember more vividly from my English teacher is his attitude at the moment of developing his class, he never made us feel afraid, he used many techniques in classes, he involved all the students in the activities, he was always motivated, etc. He encouraged me to study this major because of his selfhood more than the methods he used. He was committed on the subject he taught because he was really focused on the students' needs, he adapted his lesson plans to our interests, he made us understand the same topic through different ways, and we learnt. 

The ethods of his classroom was his ability to connect us to the English subject using many activities related to our interests, and that ability worked with us. I could learn!



Jane Tompkins discovered that her goal as a teacher had been to put on “performance,” thus distancing herself from students and subject (pp.28-29).  Do you identify with her self-criticism? If so, do you share Tompkins’s diagnosis of fear as the driving force behind this distancing? In what ways other than “performance” do teachers set themselves apart?

I think that, we sometimes distance ourselves from students and subject, and we do not realize of that while we think in our goals and expectations about the role we have as teachers. It is necessary to consider our self-criticism to better in what we do without forgetting our students, the subject we teach, and our role as teachers. 


The point is to make use of fear as the driving force behind the distancing to not forget all the components of the teaching learning process who are the teacher, the students, and te classroom, and remember to make a balance among all the things which must be taken into account.