Lifelong Learners
Good teachers are those who keep learning, who continually add to their knowledge base throughout their teaching career. My lifelong motto has always been, “Good teachers have as much to learn as they do to teach.” Your education is a continual learning process. It doesn't stop just because you've graduated and have a teaching certificate. It means that if you are to provide the best possible education for your students, you need to provide yourself with a variety of learning opportunities, too.
It would be erroneous to think that your four or five years of college were all you needed to be successful in the classroom. There are too many developments within the field of education to think your college degree is the summation of all the skills, talents, and knowledge you'll need for the rest of your career. What you learn throughout the remainder of your teaching career might be significantly more important than the courses you've taken in college.
Good teachers keep current, stay active, and continually seek out new answers or new questions for exploration. Your desire to find out more about effective teaching methods and dynamic new discoveries within your field can add immeasurably to your talents as a teacher and can also add to your students' appreciation of education in their own lives.
Why Teachers Fail
Teachers sometimes fail. Teacher failure, whether dismissal, reprimand, or reassignment, is most frequently the result of poor human relations skills than lack of knowledge about their subject matter. The following reasons are most frequently mentioned:
Inability to organize and control a classroom of students
Lack of knowledge concerning how children grow and develop as pertaining to pupil-teacher interactions
Inability to work effectively with other educators
Inability to work effectively with parents
Subject-matter inadequacies
Other (immorality, insubordination, absenteeism, child abuse, senility, drugs, or alcohol)
The bottom line is this: your knowledge about a subject is considerably less important than your knowledge about students (or other people in the school). Regardless whether you're an elementary teacher or a secondary teacher, if you're more concerned about human relations than you are about your subject matter, you'll more than likely be a successful teacher.
