I would like to share with you a good ebook that’s free to help pastors and their wives with discouragement and burnout. You can find it at: http://www.stoppastorburnout.com . It’s quite helpful.

If you have pastor friends or even their wives, we are currently inviting pastors and pastor wives to join charter membership club for free for 2 months,you might want to share this with them. You may visit http://www.susandavidlifecoach.com/index.php/sponsors for more information.

We would also like to invite you to view our video on this topic at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miF-R0bCz0A.

Feel free to share this with your friends or people you care for.

Thanks,

Susan David

I too laughed at the video, and I’ve seen the movies that it parodies… it’s actually one of the reasons why I’m working on my own screenplay about a teacher (though it, like many of my projects, is on the way-back burner).

But I can attest to the power of nice white ladies… I married one, and I can tell you first hand… when she puts her mind to it, she CAN do anything. =)

That “leaving comfort and familiarity to enter the stories of others” sounds nice except that it implies condescension, and that is often exactly how it is experienced on the other end. I cannot tell you how many times teachers tried to give my siblings “enlightening” experiences by exposing us to things that they supposed were new to us, as if we lived in some deep dark cave without access to the outside world. Or how many teachers assumed (without inquiry) that my family was impoverished, or without a father in the home, or abusive, or any number of other contrived stereotypes, which ultimately led their treating us and others as less responsible for our behavior and academic performance.

Underneath every (usually) white middle class suburbanite teacher (usually female) that taught in our neighborhood schools was an unconscious racist who allowed her assumptions about us, and about herself to overly influence her expectations, teaching style, and activities.

The best teachers I had were those for whom my race and zip code were incidental. They didn’t give pep talks and they didn’t grade on a curve. They treated us like individuals and saw nothing especially noble in teaching (it isn’t particularly noble… its a job, one that pays decently for the amount of education required and which comes with good benefits and nearly ironclad job security), but saw that their responsibility was to teach well, to make us learn. Incidentally, the teachers that did this the most consistently and best happened to be Black, though I knew quite a few crappy Black teachers too.

For me, it was Michael J. Cuba – my Chem teacher in 10th grade and Quantitative Analysis teacher in 11th grade. He inspired me to excell because he never wrote “excellent” on a paper if you got 100%, he wrote “satisfactory” because in his mind you learned everything on the test so to be able to answer them all correctly was not remarkable – it was satisfactory. Then he’d give you an additional 5% points for the test.