Why be a teacher?  So you can be inspiring!  We all remember that one teacher who made a difference in our life.  Maybe it was your fifth grade teacher, your coach or your piano instructor.  Maybe they did something great, introduced you to something you had never before known, brought you on an amazing field trip or maybe it was just the way they taught.

And now that we are teachers, we long to be that person for at least one student, hopefully many more.

For me, I was inspired by my fifth grade teacher.  She was firm, yet fair.  She was organized and assigned some great projects that allowed us to explore our interests and creativity.  I wanted to do my best work for her and now I long to be that person for my own students.

We in the field spend countless hours preparing lessons, correcting papers and analyzing data and through all of that work our goal remains the same: we want to inspire young learners.  We want to help them become better people, creative people, life-long lovers of learning.

This month, many schools and district celebrate teachers through a variety of teacher appreciation activities.  At The Inspired Classroom, we are celebrating the inspiring quality of teachers by instituting a Be Inspiring day.  On or around May 15^th, do something to ignite that flame inside your students.  Share something you love with them, do a creative project with them, listen to music together or write poetry from the heart.  Invite them to share something of value with you and their classmates, challenge them to do something that truly interests them.  Inspire your students to do great things, dig deep into a concept or explore something new.

What other things can you do to Be Inspiring… to your students?

Join me, Elizabeth Peterson, as I guest moderate, at New Teacher Chat #ntchat, Wednesday May 1, 2013,  to talk  about what it means to Be Inspiring and what you can do to ignite that flame. Hope to see you there!

Contributing writer for this post was Elizabeth Peterson.

For more information about her Be Inspiring Day, visit theinspiredclassroom.com.

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Photo credit: Ashley Rose via flickr