Today I was doing a university recommendation for one of my former students, I do quite a number of those every year, and it took me back.
I found myself thinking about my journey to becoming a teacher. One that begun with me thinking it was a mistake after I was called to study education in university.
Very few young people, if any, want to be a teacher when they grow up. I was no exception. Teaching just wasn’t cool enough. I had actually no thoughts on what I wanted to be, so I went to university, albeit grudgingly and got a teaching certificate.
A decade or so later I look back at my journey and it astounds me. Here is what I do. Every day for about nine months a year, I walk into a classroom and impart knowledge.
In a literal world I teach History, in truth, I get to play a big part in shaping lives. The lives of young people who will literally be the next generation of leaders, if I do it right that is. I open their minds to new concepts and either cement or shatter precepts.
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I am objective enough to know that not much of the knowledge I impart will last far beyond the examination but I am confident though that the influence I wield can last a lifetime.
In those four walls, or under that tree or however the physical classroom manifests itself, we teachers open up new worlds.
We have the power to make our students imagination take wing or clip those wings so they forget to dream.
It has been said that education kills creativity, I beg to differ. It is the way we deliver education that kills creativity.
Teaching is the hardest and easiest of jobs. To get the child to find out for themselves by guiding them down the right path. You know you have done it right when once you send them off, those children that are yours and yet not yours, look back and remember you. And once in a while visit or ask you to be part of their lives.
Teachers are rarely recognised or praised but mostly vilified. To my fellow professionals, take time to help build the dream, grow the esteem and broaden the minds. There are few that wield the influence that we do.
So today I wrote a recommendation. Hopefully it will send this young man on yet another journey of discovery.
As it is with any good lesson, even as I did for him, I too took a journey of discovery. I am a teacher, it is who I am not what I do. I stand proud of the title.
