"I have come to a frightening conclusion..."

“I have come to a frightening conclusion,” wrote Haim Ginott in Between Teacher and Child. “I am the decisive element in the classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher I possess tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations it is my response that decides whether crisis will be escalated or de-escalated, and a child humanized or dehumanized.”