From the day we are born, and throughout our lives, we seek to discover the meaning of things which surround us. As children, we are told that fire is hot; however, we never are able to grasp this concept and accept it as the single truth, until we ourselves burn our fingers on a candle. As we get older, we are told by our wiser elders that we will never be able to define the things around us until we are able to define the things within us. However, those words, though listened to, mean very little to us at that age, because there is no self-experience backing them up, and because we are unable to accept them as the truth without proof. Thus, until we burn our fingers on our own candles of life, the words of knowledge and wisdom carried by others will continue to remain just words.

I believe that a teacher who merely provides bare information to her students has as much of an effect on her pupils as a mother telling her child that fire is hot. In order to make the student truly understand the knowledge that his teacher is passing on to him, the teacher must create the circumstances in which the student will experience the lesson, rather than hear it. In my understanding, this means active learning, and this is the only type of learning, which I respect and condone. In my classrooms, the students don’t merely receive the information and knowledge, but are provided with a variety of opportunities to experience and apply it.

It is wrong to assume that a general standard of learning can be applied to all individuals, when those individuals are so incredibly different. I firmly believe that each student learns better from different methods of teaching, and I have discovered that I find it very easy to detect, identify, and create those different ways for each of my students. Teaching is not just a career, but a craft, which I believe is one of the most important ones in our lives. It is a craft of passing our knowledge and wisdom to those who are younger, and thus is a way of building our future. When I speak to my students - I speak to the generations who will carry on life on our planet in years to come. And as I pass on a little bit of myself in every lecture I give, I make sure that those little bits are the best that are in me.