One Of The Great Challenges Of An Educator!

One of the great challenges of an educator, in my opinion is to teach what we do not know well. We are often not complete or even near masters of the topics we are assigned or duty bound to teach!. What we are or become by necessity is great facilitators and fakers! We skim through a chapter, getting the key concepts and target knowledge, and then devise, borrow or steal great exercises for the children or students to teach and learn themselves. We get them to learn by doing, and we learn right alongside with them, often only minutes ahead if that. If we approach it correctly as a mutual exploration, we often get a buy in and active role playing from the students we normally would never see in the topics we "know" and preach from memory. We are great "crammers" and can grab a lot of knowledge in a little time, but what about areas like music and art that we have very little or even negative experience with? Their little hearts hunger for this, and yet we feel so inadequate to be their mentor! But a well in the desert is water nonetheless, we must try! So how do we start, where do we start? What can we do that does no harm and even enriches?

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Chris Salter