In her reflection in Teaching with Heart, Rachel Willis writes how teachers are “powerful beyond measure.” We couldn’t agree more. Thank you for all you do!
Teachers Are Powerful Beyond Measure
— Rachel Willis
In many professions, when you get to the end of the day, you can shut off your mind and seamlessly switch to your personal life. These are professions that do not keep you awake at night strategizing new ways to reach a difficult student or concocting imaginative ways to teach the subject so it’s fresh and new. These professions are more of a career and less of a calling. Education is not one of those professions.
Nor is education just about the long hours we spend grading papers, crafting lesson plans, making phone calls to parents, speaking at PTA meetings, planning field trips, or tutoring students at the end of the day.
Education is so much more than this.
The reason we lie awake at night is that what we do matters. We make readers, writers, mathematicians, and critical thinkers. We show students the ways of the world and inspire them to change it. We teach conflict resolution through playground games and prove that above all else, knowledge is power.
I truly believe that as educators, “we are powerful beyond measure.” Yet sometimes we act as though we’re “inadequate” and “play small”—this does not serve us or the world.
We are powerful beyond measure. In every lesson we teach, every decision we make, we are having an impact on the life outcomes of our students and generations of their families to follow. I love this passage from Marianne Williamson because it “liberates” me to embrace this power and shine as we are all meant to do.
—Rachel Willis
Director of Teacher and Alumni Leadership Development
Teach For America
Washington, DC
From “A Return to Love”
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
—Marianne Williamson
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