Why Joe Lewis was a great Teacher

Nathaniel Brandon wrote this but Joe lived it every day.
Self-esteem is an experience. It is a particular way of experiencing the self. It is a good deal more than a mere feeling. It involves emotional, evaluative, and cognitive components. It also entails certain action dispositions: to move toward life rather than away from it; to move toward consciousness rather than away from it; to treat facts with respect rather than denial; to operate self-responsibly rather than the opposite. Self-esteem is the disposition to experience oneself as being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and of being worthy of happiness. It is confidence in the efficacy of our mind, in our ability to think. By extension, it is confidence in our ability to learn, make appropriate choices and decisions, and respond effectively to change. It is also the experience that success, achievement, fulfillment – happiness – are right and natural for us. Self-esteem is not the euphoria or buoyancy that may be temporarily induced by a drug, a compliment, or a love affair. It is not an illusion or hallucination. Lots of things (some of them quite dubious) can make us “feel good” – for a while. If self-esteem is not grounded in reality, if it is not built over time through the appropriate operation of mind – for example, through operating consciously, self-responsibly, and with integrity – it is not self-esteem.

Doesn’t a Teacher’s Preoccupation with Nurturing a Student’s Self-Esteem Get in the Way of Academic Achievement? That depends on the teacher’s understanding of self-esteem and what is required to nurture it. If a teacher treats students with respect, avoids ridicule and other belittling remarks, deals with everyone fairly and justly, and projects a strong, benevolent conviction about every student’s potential, then that teacher is supporting both self-esteem and the process of learning and mastering challenges. For such a teacher, self-esteem is tied to reality, not to faking reality. In contrast, however, if a teacher tries to nurture self-esteem by empty praise that bears no relationship to the students’ actual accomplishments – dropping all objective standards – allowing young people to believe that the only passport to self-esteem they need is the recognition that they are “unique” – then self-esteem is undermined and so is academic achievement. We help people to grow by holding rational expectations up to them, not by expecting nothing of them; the latter is a message of contempt