John Perricone's "Zen and Art of Public School Teaching"

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Perricone’s Zen and the Art of Public School Teaching One of the main theories that Perricone presents in his book is the idea that “we teach who we are.” This idea represents the concept that we as educators cannot expect to be effective teachers if we don’t even know who we are as individuals. We have to look deep into ourselves and determine what makes us who we are, not just the physical aspects, but our internal, psychological, and social aspects as well. I think if we truly understand what is important to ourselves, we can then translate that into the values we produce in our teaching. Just as students don’t tend to care about education unless they can find meaning in it on a personal level; I don’t think teachers can teach in a truly meaningful way without it having value for them too. I know as a future health and physical education teacher, this is an extremely valuable insight to have. For me the key to everything I want to teach my students is based on personal values and ideas about individual health and fitness. I do truly believe that if having a healthy mind and body wasn’t important to me, I would never be successful in relaying that concept to my students. I also know that as educators, we need to keep in mind that each of our students are individuals and we cannot expect them to find value in all of our teachings. However, keeping that in mind, if we are creative in helping them to discover said values, they will have better chance of learning to appreciate them. I began to touch briefly on my personal values in regards to my career choice in the previous paragraph, but there are a lot of things that come into play when looking at this. Not only do my values about health and fitness play an important piece of personal fulfillment, but also the concepts of producing good citizens and providing strength and support to students who may

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