passion served him well. Teaching was his calling. It gave him meaning far more than a paycheck or health benefits ever could. He went on to have an extremely long tenure as a teacher and a great career coaching football, girls’ softball, and boys’ basketball in the suburban Chicago area.
Part of knowing if you are measuring high on the passion index is to decide whether or not you will be the best damn educator you can be! Think about it. Teachers are the major players in the education process. That means you and me. We matter! Our daily choices matter! We have so much power and influence over students, more than we realize sometimes.
Educational researcher John Hattie claims that high-effect or high-impact teachers are passionate and inspired. Hattie describes how expert teachers show a passionate belief that all students can reach the success criteria and that intelligence is changeable.12
Hit the pause button for a moment. How does Lee’s story connect to your own perspective on life and work? To your passion and purpose?
Passion, therefore, is so much more than enthusiasm. Hattie quotes Christopher Day, a professor of education at the University of Nottingham:
All effective teachers have a passion for their subject, a passion for their pupils and a passionate belief [in] who they are and how the teacher can make a difference [emphasis added] in their pupils’ lives, both in the moment of teaching and in the days, weeks, months and even years afterward.13
It is the third element (italicized) of Day’s description that causes me to stumble a bit. How about you? I have always had a love for my subject (in my case, mathematics) and a love for my students. However, I’m not sure that in every teaching moment, or in every day, week, month, or season of my teaching life I have had a passionate belief in myself to make a difference (by the way, for those of you old enough to remember, this is what was once referenced in the education genre as high expectations). Could I really win with every student?
Why did you place the X where you did? At the writing of this book, my X would be about 82 percent. I have been trying to close the “belief in myself to help each child learn” gap for years. I often see both weakness and strength in my work. Can you and I close the gap? Can we close the gap between our X and the top of the line at 100 percent? I believe we can! To close the gap requires us to act with compassion and love, live with hope in our journey, and become more gritty and grateful.
In the next chapter, we explore the love required to become a wholehearted teacher. Let’s take a look at how to make it happen!
Draw a vertical line. At the bottom write 0 percent. At the top write 100 percent. Now, draw an X on the percent line that represents your passionate belief in yourself that you can make a difference in the lives of every one of your students.
What’s Love Got to Do With It?
Great teaching is always a form of love.
—John Ortberg
Think of the best teacher you have ever known (you may or may not have been his or her student).
Great teaching is always a form of love.
Think about those words for a moment. Do you agree? Can you think of one great teacher you have known who did not demonstrate love? Every parent knows when a teacher loves his or her child. Every child knows when there is an atmosphere of love in the classroom. And yet, it is one of the hardest emotions we share. We so easily fall in and out of love with our work, our students, and our colleagues. We use our love to inspire joy and sometimes to cause harm.
Great educators do so much more than share information; teach ideas, concepts, and facts; and give and grade assignments. Great teachers—most likely the person you named in that box—saw (or sees) beyond your failures and frailties. Great teachers and leaders see beyond your predisposed rough edges. They open you up—your mind and your heart—to a world of learning and new meaning. They teach you with a whole heart.
Name this teacher. Then list three characteristics that describe what this person contributed or contributes to your life as a student or colleague. Is there a favorite memory or experience you remember having with this teacher?
Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston graduate college of social work. As of this writing, her TED talk at Ted.com is one of the top ten most viewed with over six million viewers. She is the author of three New York Times bestsellers, including Daring Greatly in 2012. In the book, she defines wholehearted living as follows:
Wholehearted living is about engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. It’s going to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.14
It was the day after Christmas as I wrote my final blog entry for 2013. Looking back, I wish I had not taken her life for granted quite so much. I suppose we always think we can make life really matter a little bit more in the next season of our professional lives. And there is always next year, a next school season, right?
Not always.
That morning, December 26, the most wholehearted teacher I ever knew unexpectedly passed away. Mary Layco was beloved. Joyful. Smart. Grace filled. Lover of mathematics. Lover of students. Completely engaged from a place of worthiness.
Mary was humble but confident. Fair but tough. Her gift in life was teaching. She taught algebra and calculus for thirty-five years to all kinds of rough-edged students. And they loved her right back. She belongs in the mathematics teacher hall of fame. Mary was a pro’s pro—a natural. And she maximized every ounce of her teaching talent, with double the effort of most colleagues, in an attempt to become great for her students.
Take a moment to connect to Brown’s view of wholehearted living by thinking about your current professional role in your school. What is your response to her words for you and for your students?
Teaching was definitely her calling. She had a love affair with her work every day, every week, every month, every year. If Mary was having a bad moment, you didn’t know it.
She was a popular teacher for all the right reasons. As a student in her class, you would find rigor, wisdom, teamwork, ways to think creatively, confidence that you could do it, and, perhaps most important, you would have fun! Fun with algebra and fun with calculus! Imagine.
Over the years at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, I am pretty sure we had hundreds of students take calculus just for a shot at being in Mary’s class. One year, I taught calculus just so I could be on her teaching team. She taught me how to sing songs to get students to remember important rules, like the duet we created around Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools” as we taught the chain rule for derivatives to our classes.
Unexpectedly, Mary became seriously ill. The outpouring of love for her was amazing, and I am sure for her family—heartfelt, real, kind, and, perhaps too, a bit overwhelming. Events like this reveal a visceral response of thanks, gratefulness, and an inner desire to say, “Do you know how much we really love you?”
And