Igniting Passion

Sean Amore
November 5, 2023

Another Way Teachers Change Student Lives

Finding Passion Earlier In Life

Mik Love wears many hats: Father, Coach, Leader, Mentor, and Son. However his lifelong passion for helping students finding their voices and paths – that led him to his work with us – started when he, himself, was a student.

Mik Love‘s passion for supporting classroom professionals is clear. He sorta glows when he starts talking about the need for young people to find themselves – discovering not only who they are, but the value they can create in a way that is meaningful to them and leverages their talents.

Mik’s father, when he was growing up in Wichita, Kansas, was an accomplished educator. He could inspire and help Mik in myriad ways but Mik struggled with a foundational part of traditional learning – reading. “I struggled with reading. It is probably accurate to say that I didn’t really, truly ‘read’ until the seventh or eighth grade.”

“The best thing is that I had a mother and a father who understood the importance of formal education, but also understood the importance of me learning my self-worth and the value that I have.”

MIK LOVE

Teachers Make the Difference

Instead of recognizing and helping ways “around” Mik’s unique challenge, his second-grade teacher did a real number on Mik’s confidence. It wasn’t until the next fall, when he entered the third grade, that Mik’s perspective on what he could do started to change. That teacher recognized Mik’s many gifts and helped him develop those while also improvising to allow Mik’s reading time to strengthen his skill vs. frustrate him.

“Thank YOU, Ms. Mender. She started to instill values and a sense of ‘self’ in me, and that didn’t center on seatwork and traditional education,” said Mik. “She started by finding things I was passionate about. Once she realized how much I loved sports, she found her path. She found a book about Michael Jordan and we started with his statistics – numbers.” That shift made books a little less intimidating and gave Mik a different reason to open and embrace them. It also got Mik even more excited about basketball, a sport he still loves.

“Let’s just read about basketball,” she said to Mik. She found a way to make learning applicable to his journey, and it made all the difference. He now uses that journey to help others use Empowered.

Helping Maximize Teacher Impact

“Teachers can strengthen students in traditional and unexpected ways every day. They should have more support and resources. We should champion them and help them create classroom conditions that allow every student to flourish,” said Mik.

Today, Mik helps us grow through partnerships – with our staff often providing training sessions that engage more teachers to transform classrooms to become spaces that offer personalized education, using Empowered’s extensive collection of free resources to make it practical.

With the knowledge that Empowered teachers share, students will leverage these principles as a framework from which to think. They will always make decisions from the time they wake up to the time they close their eyes. “They are making decisions that impact not only themselves but others including the concepts of responsibility and sound judgment,” said Mik.

“Empowered is not just in a classroom. These are real world application in real world markets.” The world needs more people using their smarts and teachers who are passionate about students, and Mik Love is committed to sharing that message with as many educators as possible.