I am grateful for the hard work teachers do to provide wonderful learning experiences for students every day. I appreciate the kindness, generosity, and patience of teachers. They never give up; they are wiling to try new things; they do creative things to reach every student. Teachers do not stay on the sidelines; they are part of a team, making a thousand decisions a day for benefit of students.
--Dr. Anthony Godfrey
This is the value of the teacher, who looks at a face and says there's something behind that and I want to reach that person, I want to influence that person, I want to encourage that person, I want to enrich, I want to call out that person who is behind that face, behind that color, behind that language, behind that tradition, behind that culture. I believe you can do it. I know what was done for me.
—Maya Angelou
The power of an effective teacher is something almost all of us have experienced and understand on a personal level. If we were particularly fortunate, we had numerous exceptional teachers who made school an exciting and interesting place. Those teachers possessed a passion for the subjects that they taught and genuine care for the students with whom they worked. They inspired us to play with ideas, think deeply about the subject matter, take on more challenging work, and even pursue careers in a particular field of study. Some exceptional teachers achieve celebrity status, such as Jaime Escalante, the math teacher who inspired the
film Stand and Deliver, but thousands of unsung heroes go unrecognized in their remarkable work with students on a daily basis
-- Pamela D. Tucker and James H. Stronge