In Appreciation Of Teachers

LENS: a transparent substance used to form an image by focusing rays of light:  a medium that focuses or clarifies.  (Websters’s)

     As a teacher,  I am that LENS…focus…images…clarify…light…I am a LENS through which my students see the world…I am a lens that brings to my students a world of images, a lens that brings life into focus, a medium that clarifies what is, and projects what may be…a transparent substance that accumulates the rays of learning, and casts the beam of knowledge upon them.

     As a teacher, I am a Wide-Angle Lens. As such, I can widen a student’s perception of all that is around them, I can spread their thoughts and concepts throughout every corner of the globe, from the dusty villages of India to the frozen tundra of the Antarctica. I can stretch their sense of time, and have them walk with the pharaohs in ancient Egypt, or live through a time warp in some infinite future.I can send their minds toward boundless horizons of yet unthought-of of domains – stretching, reaching, diverging, casting their shadows far beyond any I can conceive of…

     I am a Telephoto Lens. As such, through knowledge, I can give to a student images and tools that will provide the opportunity to reach farther than they thought possible. I can multiply the distance their mind will travel, I can magnify the power of their thoughts to reach for solutions that can be theirs. Through me, they can see the stars, faintly glimmering in my lifetime, but brilliantly bursting upon them in theirs. I can bring to them the world up close, and take their minds to heights and depths uncharted and unexplored…

     I am a Converging Lens. As a magnifying glass used to focus a narrow beam of the sun’s rays to ignite a piece of paper, so I can set a student’s imagination on fire. I am the lens through which many diverse thoughts can be focused by a student and have them converge into one intensely burning thought, one exciting, motivating, life-directing idea. And with that focus, if properly pointed, I can change a dormant truth into a raging inferno of ambition, direction and achievement, one that can set the world on fire…

     I am a Filter Lens. As such, I can color a student’s world with all the colors of the rainbow. I can let them see the blackness of space, the blue of a Colorado sky, bullfight blood red, Pea plant green, and Sutter’s Mill gold. I can take a drab concept of the world and turn it into a cacophony of colors that bring alive the world with the flush and blush of life…

     I am a Prism. As such, I can take the ray of life and humanity, and separate it into the many hues of mankind. I can play these colors across the screen of a student’s mind, and indelibly impress upon them that the white light of living is in reality made up of a blend of yellow, and black, and red, and all the colors of the spectrum.

     The lens must  be constantly polished, if my students are to see clearly through me. It must be wiped with the cloth of new knowledge, the surfaces reground with new technology and the glass kept free of the dust of dogmatism.

     My philosophy – and responsibility and fervent desire as a teacher – is to have each student pick up the spectacles of learning, and have their mind’s eye look through the lens, and see the world in a new way,  see the world as it has been, as it is, and  see with a clear vision what it can be.

                                                Walt Tremer

                                                Pennsylvania NASA Teacher Astronaut