The One Thing All Great Teachers Do: Nick Fuhrman (Transcript)

Full text of educator Dr. Nick Fuhrman’s talk: The One Thing All Great Teachers Do at TEDxUGA conference.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here:

TRANSCRIPT:

45 minutes! That’s the amount of time it can take to change somebody’s life forever. It happened to me.

I’m going to take you back to Maryland, and me as a seven-year old; I grew up in Perry Hall, Maryland. And I’m sitting on a carpet square on this particular Tuesday morning in an elementary school.

And I was on the edge of the carpet square. And my friends and I were all on the edge because there was a guy who was coming to visit our school on this particular day, who was known as Ranger Bill.

Ranger Bill worked for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, and Ranger Bill was an environmental educator. And he brought with him that day a turtle and a snake and an owl, and a hawk and a vulture.

And he came in, and this guy was looking snazzy. He had this great-looking uniform on all these animals and he edutained us. It wasn’t just teaching; he was entertaining us. He had us on the edge of that carpet square.

And I watched this guy teach this day, and I remember 45 minutes is the amount of time he spent with us. And then he left. And I remembered thinking to myself: I want to be like that guy. I want to be like Ranger Bill, the way he looked, the way he was teaching, everything.