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Teaching is more than a career, it is a vocation. You need to feel the strong emotion tha you have the main characteristics to be a good teacher and feel the joy of doing it. Acknowledge the great impact you have on the students and the huge responsibility it comes with. I consider empathy, kindness, patience, creativity, awareness and the will to be constantly learning the indispensable qualities of a good teacher. Teaching is not as simple as many people believe, is an important duty. A good teacher has the opportunity to change and affect lives in an important positive way and in a small scale, create a big change. Empathy is the ability to understand what another person is experiencing, realizing the cultural and historical context, getting as close as you can to their reality. A good teacher builds an honest relationship with the students, gets to know them; and creates a positive, productive and safe learning environment. Understanding what the students need, what are they going through and their background, builds an open communication channel that is essential and will affect directly the classroom energy and learning process. Kindness and patience are qualities every human being should have, but I am aware we all have different personalities and abilities. The personality of a teacher should be sensitive and compassionate to students differences. A teacher has to become an analyst on the students strong and improvement areas to challenge them in a kind, affectionate way. Also, the teacher should be kind and patience with herself, making a self- analysis of her needs and emotions to be your best self and therefore, teacher. The use of imagination and out of the box ideas that are valuable, is a must to be a good teacher. Creativity helps the students to engage and become motivated, teaches a problem solving and growth mindset, and challenges them by going beyond of what is expected in a classroom. The “surprise” element when using your imagination and creativity makes learning exciting, makes them feel special, think differently and most importantly, gets them to pay attention. Awareness is a personal characteristic that make you have knowledge and perception of yourself, others and the togetherness. Being able to make a conscient exercise of your tendencies, reactions, strengths and weakness can help you be assertive and consistent with the students; something they deserve and will help establish trust and a receptive learning environment. Teaching can be very satisfying. The fact that the learning process is mutual and constant make teaching exciting. Realizing and being humble about the things you don't know and that you have many things to learn, makes teaching honest and fulfilling . Teaching can be rutinary in some ways, but being part of a group with different personalities, always brings an element of surprise that makes the teacher also feel motivated and engaged with the class. Teachers get to be an inspiration for the students, and having these qualities mentioned before, will encourage them to be better humans. Each day you work with your students and they share their ideas with you, we become more influential. It is our responsibility to achieve their potential, and for that, we need to work on achieving ours as teachers. A good teacher needs to feel comfortable with their own self, to be coherent to teach others to be their best!
