Teachers can be exciting, frustrating, boring, and many other ‘ings’, as all students know. So can teaching, as all teachers know. Teachers are also chronically underpaid and overworked. In the West, we don’t often think of them as heroes. And they don’t often face a violent death for their work, as they do in Afghanistan. Yet even in the US, teaching is a profession that calls for courage.
Note! This posting contains reproductions of beautiful Islamic paintings of the Prophet Muhammed.
It can take courage to teach about air pressure and electromagnetism in California, as science teacher Greg Schiller discovered when he volunteered to help kids with their entries for a science contest. He was suspended when a school bureaucrat noticed that one of the kids’ projects was a tiny version of the marshmallow cannon President Obama praised at a White House science fair, and another used an electromagnetic coil to launch an object several … feet. They …