Thursday, February 28, 2008

Teachers must turn tide of ‘social rot,’ Rabbi says

EDMONTON - Teachers who want to help students become good people need to value themselves even if society doesn’t, a celebrity rabbi told the Edmonton teachers’ convention Thursday.

“Our kids are waiting for someone to take us to the mountaintop, for someone to inspire us with a vision of what we can be,” Rabbi Shmuley Boteach said in a keynote address to more than 1,800 teachers at the Shaw Conference Centre. “If you can’t inspire yourself, how can you inspire a child?”

Rarely appreciated, acknowledged or otherwise celebrated, teachers “are the unsung heroes of our culture,” Boteach said.

“Unsung because most kids today don’t wake up in the morning reading a People magazine which highlights the life of the average teacher. Unsung because knowledge and education are no longer values which truly inspire.”

Boteach, 41, is a bestselling author of self-help books who hosts a hit reality TV show called Shalom in the Home. He was rabbi at Oxford University for 11 years and in 2006 was named by Newsweek as the most famous rabbi in the United States.

In his speech, Boteach said teachers face an uphill battle each time they walk into their classrooms. Students grow up knowing that society puts more value on sports heroes, Hollywood starlets and billionaires, he said.

“They know that the culture doesn’t value you,” he told teachers. “They know they’re never going to read about you in some newspaper. They know there’s not going to be a Hollywood epic about your life.”

Yet only teachers—and parents and clerics—are in a position to help save children from “the social rot that is consuming our culture,” Boteach said.

He urged teachers to help all children in their care become good people.

It’s better to help a student become a good, honest, garbage collector than a corrupt politician, he said.

Teachers can help bring about change by working against some of society’s wrongheaded values, Boteach said.

Instead of asking children what they want to do when they grow up, challenge them to explore what kind of person they want to be, he said. Kids need to find a calling, not just a career, he said.

Instead of talking about the pursuit of happiness, stress the importance of living with a purpose, Boteach told teachers.

And don’t fall into the trap of measuring kids solely by the grades they earn, he said. Instead, teachers should encourage all students to develop intellectual curiosity about the world around them.

They should also teach children that their families are more important than their friends and that love is more important than mere attention, he said.

Jeffrey Trudgeon, who teaches social studies at Steele Heights Junior High School, said he liked what he heard in Boteach’s address.

“If I can help kids become better citizens or more social beings as opposed to being able to tell me when the Treaty of Utrecht was, to me that’s what’s important,” Trudgeon said.

“With regards to concepts about what life should be or what the world should be like, I think he brought a lot of things that were very usable, especially for the new social studies curriculum.”

Danielle Steenwinkel, president of the convention association, said the event is designed to give teachers new insights they can take back to their classrooms starting next week.

“Teachers are here in order to develop and hone their skills to become better teachers,” said Steenwinkel, who teaches English and French at McKernan School. “For a lot of people, this convention is their only professional development, so it is important for us to have these two days.”

More than 8,500 teachers from Edmonton and Fort McMurray are at the conference. It wraps up today.

dhowell at thejournal.canwest.com

http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/cityplus/story.html?id=f5049c07-7b76-4c6a-854e-a953c1393cd5&k=14109