by David Safier
In the post below, I honored Raul Castro's fifth grade teacher for performing that miracle good teachers perform on a regular basis: changing people's lives for the better.
Coincidentally, I just read a Facebook post spotlighting MAS Director Sean Arce's gifts as a teacher.
“Mr. Arce has been in the business of saving lives for many years, whether he realizes it or not,” said Jesus “Tito” Romero, a 2007 alumni of the Mexican American Studies program. “It wasn’t until I had Sean Arce as a history teacher that I discovered what it meant to be as a student, and I soon realized that Mr. Arce had not only saved my life, but had changed and touched so many others.”
A gifted teacher is one who gives valuable, lifelong gifts to students (to turn a phrase).
What Arce gives students, I imagine, beyond what comes from his individual talents as a teacher, is a perspective which is part of the MAS curriculum, a perspective that helps students understand who they are and what the world is really like, beyond the normal "Dead White European Male" perspective which dominates our educational system.
[Full disclosure: I am a Live White Eastern-Judeo-European Male, so I've got nothing against the group, living or dead, but, you know, focusing so much school time on one group while pushing the rest of the world into the occasional leftover moments is both limiting and exclusionary. It's counter to the notion of broad, inclusive education.]
Combine a good teacher with an intrinsically interesting, relevant curriculum, and the odds of changing students lives for the better are pretty high.
UPDATE: I didn't notice until I saw it on The Range that the Facebook piece was from Jeff Biggers the author of the Huffington Post article spotlighting Sean Arce. It's a very good piece. Credit where credit is due.