By Lakhram Bhagirat
At the age of about 8, Sharon Rose had to be working with her sister who was a year older than her. She had to tutor her elder sibling in various subjected and for most eight-year-olds that would have been a tedious task, one they despised. But for Rose, it was not.
It ignited something in her that to this date she is at loss for words when she tries to explain it. But she knew that she had to follow the burning desire to become a teacher. She loved doing it as a child and now as an adult, she has been enjoying it for over 25 years.
Born and raised in New Hope on the East Bank of Demerara, Rose completed her secondary education at the Brickdam Secondary School and almost instantaneously knew that she wanted to become a teacher. The story of how she became a teacher, much to the disappointment of her mother, is an interesting one.
“So although my mother wanted me to work at GAC at that time, I always knew I wanted to teach so when I left to go and take the application there (GAC) but I stopped halfway and then went back to Craig Primary School. When I went and asked about this teaching and the headteacher then advised me to write the application and so on and send it in. I wrote the application and sent it and then I started working the very next day because they were short of staff.”
“My mother did not know that I was teaching, she thought I was going to work at the airport. It wasn’t after like a week and a few days after that I told her. She was really disappointed but that was what I wanted to do because I was teaching long before I even started to teach. I used to teach the neighbourhood children do spelling with them and so on,” she fondly remembers.
After telling her mother that she was a teacher, Rose went on to the Cyril Potter College of Education and upon completing her Trained Teacher’s program she then ventured to the University of Guyana where she read for a Degree in Education Management. Rose spent two and a half decades at the Craig Primary School and is ow at the St Mary’s Primary.
“I think the thing that drove me to this teaching is that of the seven siblings I have was a slow learner. I don’t think anybody recognized it then but they just thought that she was lazy and although she was older than I was I had the task of getting her to read every day. So when my mother leaves, she would give us pages in the Nelson West Indian Reader and when she comes in the afternoon she has to know it.”
Rose not only imparts knowledge to the thousands of children who passed through her classes but she also actively takes an interest in their development. She mothers them and creates a safe space for them to so that they can be open about their home life. It is by the creation of that safe space that she has been able to have her students open up about being sexually and physically abused by those who should have been caring for them.
It is by that virtue she has been able to help thousands of children realise their true potential and they have gone on to become contributing members of society.
“Some of the challenges I had is working with children who you want to learn but they were having so many domestic issues and so as a young teacher sometimes you don’t recognize it. Some of these children you want to teach Math but they did not have breakfast, you want to teach spelling but there were somebody sexually abusing them and these little challenges sometimes went unseen in my younger stage of teaching but as I got older in the teaching them, I learnt to realize that if these children got domestic issues there was all they can function in school.”
“I do a lot of counselling with the children, lots of it. So you find until now some children remember me from saving them from one issue or the other. I’ve learnt that teaching is not just Mathematics and Science and Social Studies but teaching is dealing with a child, a whole issue, the social issue, the emotional issue, the mental issue, the physical issue, every aspect of it,” Rose noted.
Goals are an integral part of Rose’s classroom and she encourages every student to set not only short-term goals but also career goals. She imparts her experience and the lessons she learned as she matured in hopes of having her students’ lives a little easier.
“You might have a child not being able to read and then you would’ve worked with them and then they would call one word or two words and when you see that improvement and the happiness that the child display seeing that it makes you want to go to work. One thing I ask them is what do you want to do when you leave school? What do you plan to do with your life? What do you want to become? and I try to instil that trust to the very level I am.”
When asked what inspires her, Rose simply says that it is seeing the children in her care smile that makes her tick.
“To someone who is thinking about joining the teaching profession I would say to them to ask themselves one very important question, do I love teaching? Do I love children? Because it’s not one of these flowery days every day. So the only thing that keeps you there, that keeps you going is your love and your passion for teaching. You gotta have a passion for it and when you have a passion for it and the children mess up or the children talk back to you or when the children’s parents tend to be very unthankful sometimes it wouldn’t daunt your spirit because it’s your passion is what keeps you going,” she advises.
