A Letter to Teachers and Educators

Cultural Relevant Tools for Teaching, Educating, and Advancing – A Letter to Teachers and Educators

In the next two weeks we want to focus on an insert from The Sea is so Wide and My Boat is so Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation by Marian Wright Edelman. In this book Mrs. Edelman writes to different audiences about the need for reform in education. This particular insert is the letter that she wrote to teachers and educators. Attached is the full letter, you are encouraged to read the letter in full. However, I want to focus specifically on the information she closes the letter with. She give 16 ways that teachers and educators should approach teaching and the educating of our scholars. That information can be found below. Please use the Online Forum to post your thoughts about the 16 ways.

I recommend that teachers and adults ponder some of the great poet-teacher Gabriela Mistral’s wisdom and sense of mission about educating children:

1. “Everything for the school; very little for ourselves.”
2. “Teach always, in the courtyard and on the street, as if they were the classroom. Teach with your demeanor, expressions, and words.”
3. “Live the beautiful theories,. Live with kindness, energy, and professional integrity.”
4. “Brighten your lessons with beautiful words, with a pertinent story, and relate each piece of knowledge to real life.”
5. “If we don’t achieve equality and culture in the school, where else can such things be required.”
6. “A teacher who does not read has to be a bad teacher. She’s reduces her job to mechanical functions, by not reviewing herself spiritually.”
7. “Better an illiterate person should teach, than that a dishonest or unjust person should teach.”
8. “You should be worthy of your job every day. Occasional successes and exertions are not enough.”
9. “All the vices and meanness of a community are the vices of its teachers.”
10. “There is no need to fear correction. A fearful teacher is the worst teacher.”
11. “Everything can be expressed so long as it’s presented properly. Even the harshest reprimand can be made without humiliating or poisoning a soul.”
12. “It’s an intolerable breach of instruction to teach facts without teaching how to learn.”
13. “In the progress of the discreditation of a school we all have a part.”
14. “The fingers of a potter should be firm and soft and loving, all at the same time.”
15. “All effort that is not sustained is lost.”
16. “It’s vital to consider the school not as only one person’s house, but as everyone’s house.”