You are not alone on having a fear of failure! And I really like what your grandma said “You got to risk it, if you want the biscuit”. In financial management, most people are risk-haters. However, I think the most worst case is not when you don’t want to take risks, but when there’s no risk but you are just not confident enough.

I really like how your post flows with thoughts about the reading materials this week. I went back and read those articles and were truly thankful that I did not miss them finally! It is so true that often times what changes our future/life is what ourselves are, not what knowledge we know or what techniques we have. I’ve found that since my first day in graduate school, I started to know myself, fight with myself, and improve myself. Emotional intelligence is so important that we need to know how to use it!

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Great post! I really like how you relates the Kong Fu panda and putting together what we’ve learnt in the semester. It makes a lot of sense that the secret ingredient is ourselves. We need to start from our authentic teaching self, and then explore deeper and further until we finally develop our own unique but useful teaching method. Thanks!

Nice post! My experience might be a little different. I had always been a student good at “banking” whatever knowledge that was taught to me and never doubted them until I enter college. I started to realize that being a knowledge “banker” cannot get me any further, not get me jobs, not into graduate school and even not get me graduate. But the good thing is now we know what real education should be, we can try not to let the same thing happen to the next generation.

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Thanks for the post! It is nice to hear a different voice here. While Paulo Freire’s writing can be sensational every now and then, I think he is making some good points. I’m sure there are a lot of good teachers around us, but I also encountered bad ones: these bad teachers see teaching as some sort of mandatory task they need to do and they teach like they don’t care about how the students think at all. For these teachers, Paulo’s book can be really helpful.

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Great post! I actually went to the 999 post and read it, and thought about if 9^9^9 is correct — that’s not important though. I am really moved by how the girl’s father fought for her while she was mistreated by the teacher. On this specific issue, the father is a real educator way better than the teacher.

I am so glad that someone shares the same feeling with me! Thanks!

Thanks for the great post the list! There are something similar between performance and teaching. One thing I like the most is that either for acting or teaching, we need to explore our authentic inner selves first. We need to be true to ourselves. But one big difference between acting and teaching, for me, is that when acting, we need to have the stage to ourselves. It is more of a process for the actors to exhibit something. But when teaching, we need to involve the students more. We are serving the students while they learn, not just exhibiting the knowledge to them.

I love the comics; it really made me laugh. The idea is true and obvious: no matter how smart and knowledgable one is, he/she can really suck at teaching. We have so many professors in universities that are really good researchers, but their lectures are boring and hard to understand. But teaching actually is a metric to assess faculty. Although the weight is different for different universities, being good teachers do add value to your academic career. And I hope we will value teaching more in the future.

Thanks for the post. I would love to see this broadway musical some day. :) I agree that ideally we all have a picture of what we think we should look like while we teach, but it might be a long journey to become that picture. I am thinking maybe we can have our friends auditing and videotaping one of our lectures, so we could learn about the distance between our real teaching style and the ideal style. We used this method a lot in dancing: we think we are being cool but sometimes we might just be silly.

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