“Educators demonstrate a wide knowledge base and an understanding of areas they teach.”

A standard with considerably fewer philosophical implications than the earlier standards on this list, this one sentence is pretty easy to summarize: teachers should know stuff. This has implications for all teachers in all walks of life. For teachers who have taught the same curriculum for a long time it means staying up to date with new information and new research, not just memorizing the course content. For teachers in a focused area of study, such as myself, it means showing intellectual curiosity beyond the scope of our focus, both to speak meaningfully on other fields and to be able to answer questions that are more advanced than the high school level. It also means possessing a strong foundational knowledge of our field of study, being able to explain concepts in multiple ways and knowing how to scaffold for students who enter our class without knowledge that we consider foundational. For all teachers it means taking time to learn new things, and fortunately we all have each other to learn from.

I still have this gift in its original packaging for the sake of the line “The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.” I am a believer in a classical education, of maintaining a wide base of knowledge and of showing intellectual curiosity in many fields, even if they are not immediately interesting to me. With the explosion of online content I have seen many fascinating videos on topics in which I had no previous interest, such as Secret Base’s analysis of the saddest punt of all time. The search for the saddest punt in the world | Chart Party (youtube.com)

It is important that we be not just knowledgeable but also show joy in doing so, emulating the spirit we hope to create in our classroom. If we treat learning as a chore then our students will more so. If we show boredom in the subject matter then our students will more so. If we instead lead with a sense of joy and curiosity then some of our students will follow our lead some of the time. That might not have been the most optimistic statement but I believe that students always appreciate sincere enthusiasm even if they don’t share it.