《教育的要素》前言（3)

Because the book is intended to highlight the qualities that make up great teaching, we have thought it useful to illustrate the form and shape which these qualities may take in classrooms with the portraits of teachers-----good and bad, exemplary and cautionary---at work.

While the characters are fictional, they are by no means figments of our fancy; we have drawn their traits and tactics from teachers we have known and from our own experiences.
We wish the sketches to demostrated teaching in progress----a living process full of teachers' faults, foibles, mistakes, quirks, fancies, and blemishes as well as their virtues and triumphs. No single person to our knowledge has ever possessed all the virtues or vices we portray, but all these attributes of teachers have existed somewhere, sometime. By illustrating with concrete examples the general elements of which we have written, we hope to make somewhat abstract qualities come to life.

因为这本书旨在强调那些构成优秀教学的特质。 我们认为呈现这些教学特质的形式很重要。通过描绘教师的形象来展示的这些特质，无论是正面的还是负面的，是用来示范还是拿来警示，都可以在工作中运用到课堂里。

尽管书中的角色是虚构的，但并不我们的幻想；我们是从真实教师以及我们自己的经验中总结出这些特征和策略的。

我们希望 在对教学过程生动的描绘中，能够呈现教师的失误，缺憾， 错误， 怪癖，幻想，瑕疵，以及教师的美德和成功。 没有哪一个人包含了上述全部的优点或劣势，但是这些都某时某地的存在于某些教师身上。我们希望能通过详实的案例来展示主要的元素，进而把抽象的特质变得鲜活可见。