Teaching Courageously and Creatively

Many years of teaching may bring in stagnancy, complacency or pride in the lives of teachers. But to teach courageously every time, they require first of all the generosity of hearts to teach every new student lovingly. Like a burning candle, a generous teacher gives one’s life to make the lives of those children meaningful and joyful. A teacher can truly educate such children if she or he has both the vocation to teach and skills to be effective. Hence Gloria Durka is right in commenting, “Vocation without skills is ineffective but skills without a sense of service can be superficial.” To bring out the best in students, a teacher needs to have the passion so that the students can really become what they could be. Hence I believe that a teacher has the responsibility for the designing the environment and for guiding the process of education.
The designing of positive environment in a school promotes and provokes creativity through imagination. The former president of India, Dr. Abdul Kalam was inspired to be an air force pilot when his high school teacher explained to him the aerodynamics of a bird. Though he could not be an air force pilot but his imagination and creativity led to him to be one of the greatest nuclear scientists of India. We know imagination can lead us to a greater level of life and make us do unbelievable things. Albert Einstein came up with his theory of relativity through his imagination. He imagined himself to be a light that traveled at 300000 km per second. Thus, the philosopher Maxime Greene claims that the role of imagination is to awaken, to disclose the ordinarily unseen, unheard, and unexpected. It is true for any of us who believes in the power of creative imagination.