Teachers have the profound ability to impact how children grow up and who they grow up to be.
The effect that your teachers can have on your self esteem, work ethic, and overall sense of self isn’t talked about as much as it should be.
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It only takes one teacher who believes in you to teach you to believe in yourself.
There is a noticeable difference between teachers who love teaching and teachers who don’t.
You can just feel a difference of energy in a classroom, regardless of whether we’re talking about kindergarten or senior year.
When a teacher walks in and is excited about what they teach, it makes the students excited. When a teacher very obviously respects their students, they are much more likely to respect them back.
Teachers who use the arts as part of their curriculum are rare nowadays.
It isn’t new news that visual, creative, and dramatic arts are underrepresented and underfunded in most public school systems.
Art is an important form of self expression for a lot of people, especially for children, who may not know how to fully express their emotions vocally.
One dedicated art teacher had an interesting idea for an upcoming class art show.
Rebecca Bonner, a teacher at Mcauliffe Elementary School in Highland Village, Texas, frequently speaks to other elementary school teachers in Facebook groups where they share new classroom tips and inspiration for projects.
She came across a particular post about kids decorating shirts with fabric markers that sparked an incredible idea.
Bonner came to class with a plain white dress and told her students to draw on it.
“I got fabric markers and sharpies,” Rebecca Bonner told Good Morning America , “I laid out my dress for two weeks and just let them doodle on it.”
As the school’s resident art teacher, she teaches more than 580 students from ages 3-11, so that’s the kind of artistic range we’re looking at here.
She arrived at the students’ final art show in the final version of the dress, covered in artwork.
“Being their teacher dressed up in their doodles is always fun,” she said, explaining that she’s always incredibly proud of her students, so it was an amazing opportunity to be able to wear her pride for their work physically so she could show everyone how wonderful it was.
Bonner’s daughter tweeted a picture of her mother in the dress and it quickly went viral.
“My mom is the cutest art teacher ever!” she wrote, “She made a dress and had every one of her students draw one thing on the dress for her to wear. This was her at her student’s art show tonight. I’M SOBBING.”
“I think it’s really important for kids to have that outlet, to have that place to create, and that freedom to create.”
Bonner says that she never expected the pictures to go viral.
“I’m not worried about being famous or anything like that,” she explained, “but I do think it’s great to promote the arts, because elementary art is not everywhere,.”
Her personal catch phrase is “turn your mess up into a dress up.”
Her daughter Lake says that her mother’s dedication inspires her everyday, especially as she is going to college to become a teacher.
“I think she just inspires students to be creative and just make their mistakes into something beautiful.”
h/t: GMA
