By Anu Dev
October 5th, was set aside as World Teachers’ Day. Teachers are the persons who pass on knowledge, mould us and prepare us for the future. A teacher’s job is never easy, and it doesn’t end when they step out of the school compound.
There are exam scripts to be marked, assignments to be graded, lessons to be planned out. Like surgeons, teachers are always on-call because most of them give us their numbers or email addresses to contact them at anytime.
As a student, I can safely say that we’re not always the easiest group of people to deal with. We complain about course-work, we gripe about difficult exams, we blame the teachers for not covering the material with us well. We talk in class, pass notes, applaud each other for ‘standing up’ to teachers, when sometimes all we’re really doing is mouthing off the teacher to look cool.
But we don’t do it because we’re malicious. We do it because we’re thoughtless. We don’t really consider how our actions in the classroom might impact our teachers.
We don’t consider the teachers who actually care about what they’re doing – how’d you think they feel when we decide that their homework wasn’t as important as some other subject’s? That’s what days like World Teachers’ Day are supposed to get us to consider.
They’re supposed to make us start thinking and step out of our own personal little bubbles for just a little while and put on someone else’s shoes for once.
Because it’s not easy trying to get 30 students to all understand the same concept.
Everyone learns at different paces – how do you strike that perfect pace? How do you get students to get enthusiastic about poultry and cattle when they have all of the entertainment of the Internet just a click away on their phones? Students have to acknowledge Teacher’s Day and show their teachers that they appreciate the dedication of their teachers, in whatever big or small way that they can. I’m not a teacher, but I do know that for me personally, even a small compliment goes a very long way in making me feel better about myself and about what I’m doing.
At QC, we do things a bit differently – we have our teachers’ day in February. And the Prefect Body is usually in charge of getting the entire school involved in putting on a show in honour of our teachers. And in planning the show earlier this year, we had to do a lot of thinking about our teachers.
And we all did a lot of self-reflection and most of us were struck by the enormity of the impact our teachers have had on us.
Teaching truly is a noble profession. If knowledge is power, and one of the most precious things in life, then teachers are the ones who get to spread that knowledge to millions of schoolchildren every day.