When I was little I experienced magic. I was at a seven-year-old friend’s birthday party and there was a magician. I was chosen from the audience to ‘help’ him with a trick that involved the removal of a coin from my ear. I am sure that you have all seen the trick. Looking back the trick doesn’t seem like anything special, but at the time it changed everything. I remember feeling as though I had contributed to the magic, that my seven-year-old self had caused a coin (a British ten pence piece) to travel through the cosmos, from a magician’s wallet and somehow lodge itself behind my ear – all without me noticing. It was magic, and I was the one that, in some way, had caused these strange events to occur. I have since grown up and come to realise that I had not indeed caused this to occur, but rather that it was a series of misdirections from a trained party performer.
As a grown up, I thought that magic was something that was reserved for kids and that one’s loss of awe and wonder was the inevitable result of growing up. But I was wrong…oh how I was wrong.
I have seen, witnessed and experienced wonderful things in teaching. I have sat and watched some of the most incredible, gifted and talented teachers teach. I have seen them create and craft wonderful things, explain abstract concepts in ways that children understand and build connections between the most unusual things. I have seen students come alive when they read a book, write a story and explain their ideas. I have seen, and experienced first hand, years and years of disadvantage begin to dissolve..
I can’t do anything else. I am in the business of impacting the lives of young people. I’m in the business of redefining though patterns, I’m in the business of helping children connect the dots, I’m in the business of helping those that struggle to take a few steps closer to being what they want to be when they grow up. I am an educator, a teacher and an unrealistic thinker.
I’m in the business of educating the next wave of inventors, scientists, business owners, fathers, thinkers and dreamers, mothers, parents and citizens. We cannot take this for granted, we cannot allow the constraints of curriculum and process to restrict.
I can not do anything else. I did not find teaching, it found me. I was spoilt for sitting in an office, I was spoilt because I experienced teaching.
Have you ever experienced something and watched it with so much awe? Maybe it was your child walking for the first time, maybe a humming bird taking nectar from a flower, a painting that reduced you to tears or the most beautiful sunset while walking on a beach with a loved one? Have you experienced that moment when all else, all pressure, all fear and all uncertainly is removed? I have, and that is when I teach. I have seen first hand how great teaching removes barriers, removes prejudices and creates meaning and makes sense of the world.
Have you experienced magic?