50 Great Teachers

I always love to take a moment to appreciate NPR. It reminds me how creative and strong humans can be in the face of adversity.

The first passage that I read was titled, “A ‘Wisdom Keeper.” This article was about a teacher named Miss Begay in Tucson, Arizona. She worked in a an elementary school composed of predominantly Native American, Hispanic and Somalian students. The community seems very geared away from education, though Miss Begay had an opposite view. She shares that Navajo teachers are deemed as “wisdom keepers” who are revered at the leaders who had the responsibility of the intellectual upbringing of a new generation. Anyone who reads this article can see this mentality play into Begay’s teaching. One of her students commented, “‘She teaches me when I don’t want to learn.'” This really stuck with me because I think that that is every teacher’s goal. No matter where we teach or who our audience is, there will be students who are apprehensive to learning. I love how Miss Begay takes this attitude and uses it to drive her to work harder and connect with every student in her classroom, even those who have been treated as a lost cause. Her compassion, enthusiasm and warmth clearly radiate through the author’s writing and I would love to reflect this same feeling with my students.

The next article that I looked at was about a New York teacher named Mister Whaley. Whaley is a second grade teacher whose classroom is largely composed of ESL students and children of immigrant families. Whaley is one of the “Great Teachers” because he does everything in his power to empower his ESL students. He asks them to participate in class activities to the same extent that native English speakers do. He also reassures them that being an immigrant or having family who are immigrants is not a bad thing. We live in a nation that is progressively moving toward the idea that diversity and having immigrant status should have negative repercussions. In order to combat this, Whaley takes time in his classroom to celebrate the term “immigrant” and explain how important these people are to our society. Whaley is a great teacher who has made himself an ally to bilingual students.

Lena Solow is a sex ed teacher in the Bronx. the article starts off acknowledging the cringe factor that we all feel with the subject of sex ed. However, this tone changes as the author delve into the tone Solow has on the subject. This teacher uses her content area to empower women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community without rustling too many feathers. Though her classroom celebrates sex and sexuality, she does this in such a way that preaches inclusion and lack of judgement, rather than saying that a child’s parent’s opinion is wrong. She does not want her classroom to become a battleground for the “right” and “wrong,” but rather a place where students can shed their armor and feel safe in their sexual identity. I think this is a content area that we need to bring more focus to as a nation because out next generation needs to understand the idea of tolerance, acceptance, and respect for both sexual identity and sexuality as a whole. I love the steps that this teacher is taking to achieve this.