SO YOU ARE A TEACHER!..WELL DONE THAT YOU FEEL SO STRONGLY AS TEACHING IS SUCH AN IMPORTANT VOCATION,SO MANY LIVES ARE SHAPED BY TEACHERS.
I live in London and would love to talk to you as I am trying hard to be passionate about my life,you could help me if you cared to,anyhow it would be nice to be friends.My email address is smartist2003@yahoo.com
Hope to hear from you some day
Siobhan.

passionate people do have more fun. I am a pretty passionate person, and I have a lot of fun…I meet a lot of people who don’t seem to be having much fun and I ask myself…am I just lucky, or did I chose passion as a choice?

I thought of you just now when I read this blurb from an editor-friend’s list of his favorite books of 2006. Have you read it?

The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Like all of Powers’ novels, this latest—which won the National Book Award—is a muscular wrestling with big questions, here centering on (but not limited to) what the far reaches of neuroscience might have to tell us about who we are, how we construct and maintain a sense of our identity. (One key character in the novel is based to some degree on Oliver Sacks.) All this is fleshed out in a story set in motion when a young man rolls his truck on a freezing February night in Nebraska. The sandhill cranes have alighted en masse for their annual visit, and with no forcing Powers weaves questions about their fate into the story. Finally the book is a kind of wrestling with God, not exactly the God of the Bible (and there are glimpses of fundamentalists, one very angry, others rather befuddled, to drive home that point) yet akin.

Go to it! I LOVE teachers! The future is in your hands. (No pressure intended…)

Monotreme – I have thoroughly enjoyed reading, and cheering, your creative list of goals!

My favorite professors were definitely infected with passion for their respective fields, and had the ability to infect us unwitting students as well. Unfortunately, there are not enough of you guys out there!

Quality is another characteristic which seems to be increasingly difficult to come by in the workforce in general. Hmmm…how many sloppy FDA audits did I witness at my last job…?

I’m very happy to see that there are still some folks out there that prioritize quality.

Cheers!

and I have always felt strongly about my subject, the wonderful thing is that passion and enthusiasm get multiplied in a class, and when you are a good mentor you know it from your students.
So passion is good. But I changed the way I’m teaching since I read the result of the researches made by prof. Robert Boice. In his writing he demonstrates that in teaching moderation works better than passion, and I am quite coming to agree with him. Moderation means not to be carried away by your passion for the subject, but be always ready to slow down and pause and check if the message has gone through, dialogue and feed back etc. I would call it a teaching not only oriented to the subject but to the students instead.
I don’t want to convince you that teaching without passion would be better, absolutely not, but just warn you that sometimes passion could be a bit too much. I am teaching at university and am really looking forward to getting the students’ evaluation, so I’ll know if Boice is right in the end!

Have taught French and Counselling for years, and in the hardest moments, it is my interest and passion which kept me going. (passion in French referring to sharing my culture, more as a francophone really)

Well done and all the best!