A genuine teacher is usually in touch with the pulse of the sacred in the classroom. A genuine teacher realizes that conveying knowledge is important, but that the real point is to begin to sound the secret language of life. One way of identifying genuine teachers is to listen closely to how they speak about their work. A genuine teacher s primary reward lies in the work itself. Rewards such as money and status are of course not unimportant to genuine teachers.
Genuine teachers love mundane pleasures, too.
Those are my current working rules of thumb. Over time, I ve come to believe even more strongly in this rule of thumb. In short, my experience tells me that when I don t enjoy my role, my students usually don t enjoy their role either. And without my own willingness to learn from them, my students learn precious little about life from me. Of course, my own positive attitude is no guarantee that anything positive will happen for my students.