Teachers’ Day: Heroes, heroines and blackboards

Sir Frank Peters :

There’s a wise old adage that says… “If you’ve been lucky enough to have been taught by a good teacher… you are lucky enough!”
Actually, the adage isn’t all that old. I just made it up, but it might eventually grow moss because there’s truth in it. Throughout history good teachers have been revered and regarded as “influencers” long before the word “influencer” was created and started to gain popularity.
Teachers are special, no doubt. They toil for the benefit of other children in the classroom, and even take assignments home with them to correct. They are under-paid, and under-appreciated by their charges, bureaucrats, and parents. Yet they are catalysts and architects of society, indeed the universe. They inspire, mould, shape, and influence all future professions, all in the course of a normal day’s work.
They are divinely gifted with ethical morals, magically help people find love, and build respect and confidence within themselves, and realize their potential by opening their eyes, opening their minds, and touching their hearts to exciting new possibilities. Like I said, they’re special.
A good teacher is a crafts expert who can fashion from what seems by most to be a rock-headed youth, into a social diamond. And that takes skill.
Teaching is not all about the knowledge they impart. The content itself is just the work of backroom boys, a few harmless souls trying to carve a living to support their families by fingering through books, plucking text extracts here and there, and reassembling them jigsaw-like to appear up-to-date and appropriate to modern demands. Basically, anyone can cut and paste.
‘Good’ teaching requires a special set of different skills. It takes a superior kind of person to become a good teacher and more difficult still to become a great teacher. It’s impossible to measure the value of the contribution a good teacher makes to an individual or to society. They’re custodians of children’s destinies and sort of like mystics… sages… gurus encased in rainbow-like coloured auras with a spotlight from Heaven helping to conceal their wings against the blackboard backdrop.
Every school is a Temple of Knowledge and serves as a beacon of hope in the choppy, desolate ocean of ignorance, while every teacher is a source of inspiration and optimism for children to learn, develop, and fulfill all of their social, emotional, academic aspirations and needs.
Thursday, October 5, 2023, is Teachers’ Day. Yipeeee!
I feel, however, that title itself short-changes them inexcusably, so I’ve taken the liberty to rename the occasion Teachers’ APPRECIATION Day, for my own satisfaction and appeasement of conscious, if nothing else.
Good teachers richly deserve standing ovations, together with enthusiastic and prolonged applause. Their professional tool kit includes compassion, understanding, patience, empathy, love, encouragement, inspiration, sympathy, and other human qualities. They’re First Responders, First Aiders, nurses, and mothers when schoolyard accidents occur and they mix-in copious sympathy to the Savlon they apply to the cut. They have heart; they have soul. Their hearts, seemingly, are larger than regular human hearts.
They know criticism and condemnation is poisonous to a child’s learning and therefore they Encourage… Encourage… Encourage instead at every given opportunity. In return, they’re loved, respected, and admired by all the doting little Bambi eyed-children who peer up at them daily in awe.
And there lies the enormous difference… To a committed professional teaching isn’t a ‘job’; it is a vocation ­­- a calling to serve humanity, similar in reverence to nursing. They love their work and it shows. Pupils don’t care how much the teacher knows, it’s how much the teacher cares and imparts.
To become a good teacher requires more than a faded paper certificate and knowledge of the subject. Every good teacher knows the enormous importance of establishing a good relationship with those in their class. When there’s a good relationship, amazing, magical learning happens and sparks fly.
Good teachers are gifted with patience. Once the trust is solid, the sky’s the limit. Children will do ANYTHING for their favourite teacher… especially learn! Good teachers take on the role as a substitute parent, and become their friend, not their jailer. They view the children in their care to be their family members and make them feel wanted, feel loved, feel appreciated, feel human. They continuously look for opportunities to say something nice… something encouraging.
Teachers are the unsung heroes of all nations and grossly under appreciated by many. They are silent heroes and heroines; educators, mentors, character sculptors and substitute parents to all, and dear friends to many.
A world without teachers is unimaginable. Their fingerprints never fade from the lives they touch.
Happy Teachers’ Appreciation Day!

(The writer is an anti corporal punishment crusader, an award-winning writer who successfully campaigned for a five-day school week in Bangladesh).