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A passion for learning starts with a great teacher

Asign that our children are in excellent hands in our local schools is seeing a Weyburn high school teacher being recognized for teaching excellence at the national level.

Asign that our children are in excellent hands in our local schools is seeing a Weyburn high school teacher being recognized for teaching excellence at the national level.
Science teacher Karen Kennedy-Allin will receive the Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence in a ceremony to be held on Tuesday, May 28, in Ottawa, when she will be presented with a Certificate of Excellence.
One of the comments about her, in describing some of the reasons why she merits this national award, is that she feels students will not care until they know you care as a teacher.
It’s important, first of all, to know that there are teachers who care greatly about education, and about their students, and second of all, it’s important that their excellence is recognized.
Our students need to know that they have a teacher who is passionate about her subject, and is also passionate about their lives and future, as this is part of the whole reason why teachers dedicate their lives to the imparting of knowledge to their students.
In commenting on her reasons for being a teacher, Kennedy-Allin said, “Teaching is more than a job for me; it is a calling. I am constantly trying to make sure my students know that I deeply care about them and that I really want them to enjoy what they are learning in class.”
This is what teaching is all about for her and in leading her subjects of Physics, Environmental Science and Biology to the senior high school students at the Weyburn Comprehensive School.
With a passion like that, it will ensure she will have an impact on the students far beyond just the walls of her classroom, but it will impact on the lives of the students as they go on to post-secondary school and their lives and careers.
As William Butler Yeats commented, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
In other words, a good teacher isn’t just dumping facts into the brain-pans of students, but is trying to get their students to be passionate about what they’re learning, and this will in turn lead to lifelong learning, whether a person is still in school or not.
In this day and age, knowledge is important (and some would say, it’s everything), but beyond the knowledge, for a person to be fulfilled in their lives in chasing their dreams, there needs to be the passion and love of what they’re doing — and that all starts in the classroom, right from Kindergarten, through elementary up until graduation day and beyond to college or university.