On Teaching: "Meekness"

As the years have passed, I have become convinced that meekness is one of the most important qualities in a good teacher. This goes contrary to what I believed when I was younger, having been raised in a culture where bravado and machismo were rated far higher than humility and gentleness. I grew up believing that a teacher must be strong, authoritative, committed, and consistent, all of which seemed to cancel out any possibility of meekness. I guess I thought of a meek person as being basically "weak", and there was no room for weakness in my image of the master teacher. Lately, though, I have been considering meekness in a completely different way -- a way that allows me to see it as a quality associated with immense strength. Interestingly, the word derives from a Latin root meaning "soft", and I'm beginning to see, as I think about it, that soft things are actually surprisingly strong. In fact, their strength is created by their softness. Think of water, air, and sunlight. Because they are all soft, they are not easily injured, and from this comes their astonishing power. In a sense, they can't easily be defeated, and undefeatedable forces are, by nature, extremely impressive (On the other hand, hard things, including teachers, are rather easy to damage, and are thus neither strong nor impressive.) I would like to become a "softer" teacher than I am now -- a teacher who gains strength through meekness. There's an old truth that the greatest weakness can hide the greatest strength, and I would like to be a "weak" teacher in that sense. Like water and sunlight and air, I want to "give" and ebb and flow and recede and go around and settle. This is the opposite of hardness and rigidity, and it may make me a stronger teacher than I've ever been.