days you’re teaching material you find boring or uninteresting?
I should, perhaps, mention there are rare exceptions…teachers who find everything about the subject they teach exciting. I call them freaks. I have one of them in my history department. He eats, sleeps, breathes, and “dresses” history on a daily basis. His house is like a museum. He is a reenactor in his spare time and has been an extra in numerous historical documentaries and movies. He, and people like him, don’t need this section of the book. Good for them. The rest of us must intentionally find ways to bring passion to our work every day.
To solve this problem, I break passion into three distinct categories: Content Passion, Professional Passion, and Personal Passion. By consciously focusing on identifying, developing, and using all three of these categories, it is absolutely possible to become a powerfully passionate teacher every day of the school year. Take some time to answer the questions listed for each of these categories. To most effectively use this section, I recommend actually writing your answers down so you can refer to them later. At the very least please take the time to mentally complete the exercise before moving on.
Within your subject matter, what are you passionate about teaching? In other words, of all of the topics and standards you teach as part of your curriculum, which are the ones you most enjoy?
I am most passionate about teaching the Civil Rights Movement. I love everything about it, and within that unit there are even areas I am more passionate about than others. For example, I especially love to teach the edgier side of the movement. I don’t need any extra help getting fired up when teaching about Malcolm X or the Black Panther Party. I don’t have to work very hard to energize the room when discussing the ideas of Malcolm X. I enjoy meeting that
“energy” head-on to try to open the minds of my students. I also love to teach about the resistance to slavery. And the counterculture of the sixties…no problem! My students love hearing the music from that time period that I use to help deliver the content.
On the other hand, I am not passionate about railroads! I understand their historical significance, but I don’t stay up at night in anticipation of teaching about them. I’m also not real excited about the Industrial Revolution. I don’t get too fired up about military history. So what can you and I do on the days where the subject matter doesn’t fall into our content passion? That is where professional passion and personal passion come in.
Within your profession, but not specific to your subject matter, what are you passionate about? What is it about being an educator that drives you? What ignites a fire inside you?
I’ll give you a hint on this one: Your answer probably consists of the reasons you became a teacher. Too often, as we manage the dayto- day stresses of the job, we fail to reconnect with the reasons we felt called to this sacred and invaluable profession in the first place. This is the all-important “life-changing” category and I invite you take the time to consider and write down your response.
My professional passion sounds like this: I’m passionate about creating lifelong learners. I’m passionate about increasing the selfesteem and self-confidence of my students. I’m passionate about having students leave my class with a larger vision of what is possible for their lives. I enjoy helping students who are apathetic about school get excited about coming to school, even if it is just because of my class. I love developing the creative and innovative spirit of my students. I am passionate about not letting them fall victim to the horrific educational trends that would have us turn children into test-taking automatons who are able to spit out facts and trivia but are unable to speak about anything of significance or meaning. I want to model and inspire a spirit of entrepreneurship and drive for constant self-improvement in all areas of life. I am also passionate about developing engaging presentations for my material.
Frankly, I could fill this book with examples of my professional passion because it is the real reason I became a teacher. Few people go into teaching because of their love for a particular subject. Not many English teachers chose their careers based on an undying passion to teach the effective and correct use of the comma. Math teachers rarely have an unnatural love of pi. I certainly was not drawn to the profession in order to teach railroads. Chances are you, like me, are a teacher because of your professional passion.
Here is the key: On all of those days when you don’t have passion for your content, you must consciously make the decision to focus on your professional passion. This intentionality doesn’t come naturally, at least not at first. That’s why it is crucial to make the commitment to change your perspective and consistently focus on your professional passion. I constantly strive to include my professional passion in every lesson I teach with what I call life-changing lessons (LCLs). LCLs provide me the opportunity to attempt to transform the lives of my students regardless of my particular content standard for the day.
Incorporating an LCL, my true passion in education, also allows me to consistently “bring it.” This focus gives me the juice to light up a classroom no matter what topic I might be teaching that day. For example, when I’m teaching about Malcolm X, there’s a certain amount of factual, historical information I must deliver to my students. But I also have a hidden and larger agenda. I use Malcolm’s life story to show my students the unbelievably incredible ability human beings have to transform their lives. Here was a man whose father was killed, most likely murdered, his mother placed in an institution, and he was raised in the foster care system. He dropped out of school after having his dreams and ambitions crushed by, of all people, a teacher. He eventually got involved with the wrong crowd, was arrested and convicted for breaking and entering, weapons charges, and burglary. While serving a ten-year jail sentence, he completely transformed his life through the power of self-education. He read book after book, took correspondence courses and became a highly educated man. He joined the Nation of Islam, changed his name and eventually became a Muslim minister and the national spokesperson for the Nation. After becoming disillusioned with the Nation of Islam’s leader, taking a trip to Mecca and many other places overseas, he broke away from the organization and transformed his life and message yet again. He disavowed some of his earlier rhetoric and began delivering a new and powerful message that was more inclusive yet maintained his hardline ideology of self-determination and Black Nationalism. Just as he was refining this message and preparing to lead his new organization, he was gunned down while delivering a speech at the Audubon Ballroom. He was thirty-nine years old.
It’s difficult to get to a much lower spot in life than having your father murdered, your mom in a mental institution, dropping out of school, and sitting in prison as a convicted felon. Yet Malcolm chose to rise above those huge, seemingly insurmountable obstacles and became an inspirational leader to thousands. I use Malcolm’s story to show my students that no matter where they start in life, or how low they fall, they can still, through the power of self-education and their own efforts, rise to greatness.
A lesson on Abraham Lincoln becomes a lesson on persistence and overcoming adversity. The story of Rosa Parks shows that a single, ordinary person with strong convictions, and the courage to act on those convictions, can transform history. A D-Day lesson is an opportunity to teach appreciation and gratitude for the sacrifices made by previous generations to secure the liberties that we often take for granted today. Every lesson can include an LCL.
Professional passion can help fill the gaps you might have in content passion in other ways, as well. For example, I mentioned that I am not passionate about railroads. Fortunately for my students, I am passionate about developing engaging presentations for my material. So, although I might not be jazzed about
