Managers vs. Leaders

I love this quote from Seth Godin:

"Managers work hard to get their employees to do what they did yesterday but a little faster and a little cheaper.  Managers seek compliance and reliabilty.  Leaders don't know what's around the corner.  They're leading us somewhere and their goal is to challenge the people who work for them to do something that they didn't expect better than they hoped."

When I read this, of course, I immediately applied it to my job as a teacher.

As teachers, do we seek compliance and reliability?  And those things are nice.  They are okay.  But if all you can do as a teacher is manage your class, is that really what you want to spend your career doing?

Or as teachers, do we challenge our kids to do something (read a new book, present a lesson to the class, set up a blog, give a speech, or write an essay) that they didn't think they could.  Not only that, but as a teacher do we push them to do that something better than they thought they could do it?

I don't think teachers who manage classes can do that.  I think only a teacher who leads their class can get their kids to do that.

Now does that "leading" necessarily look the same?  Not at all.

But that's what's so great about teaching.  Some of us can lead our classes through our passion or our content mastery or our caring.  It doesn't have to look the same.  Nor do I think that it should look the same.