– Hem Raj Kafle
Some school children might wonder, “How do teachers know so many things? Why are they smarter than many other people? Why do people generally not speak ill about them?” The answer in growing up. They know that teachers have spent certain years learning, and imparting that learning. They have learnt from more qualified persons and qualitative sources. They command respect for being responsible, and thus people do not generally speak ill about them.
The opportunity to teach is reward. The realization of being rewarded starts with the belief of being in good company of students and colleagues who signify the piety of creating, transmitting, expanding and sustaining the mission of culturing the society as whole. The teacher is torchbearer, who always helps fellow beings to explore their lives’ directions and to widen their intellectual horizon.
There are productive challenges in being teacher. First, you can’t afford the lazy. A simple rule in teaching is you have to know more than what you can tell in classroom. For this you must continuously know. A competent teacher makes every teaching a new teaching, and every day a different day. And a teacher must be more dynamic and knowledgeable than students. Students adore teachers who are intelligent and active, in the same extent as teachers would love to teach intelligent and active students. Such expectation of reciprocation and mutual respect forms the first necessary classroom infrastructure. Second, you can’t be dishonest. Dishonesty does not go with real teaching. Dishonest persons, in fact, are unfit in every profession that involves welfare and service to people in large number and multiple generations. Even if honesty may not pay at once in teaching, it certainly gives the satisfaction of being a part of a virtuous growth of knowledge and wisdom, which expand as they transfer, and transfer as they expand.
In teaching there is always a chance to know people and be known. Knowing people helps you increase the number of friends. Adding the number of acquaintances is a good source of knowledge, and partly, of emotional security. And this does not happen just once, but over the years. The piety of the profession itself suffices to keep you honest and invulnerable to corruption. Teachers are expected to act as role models both in knowledge and conduct. They are ethically conditioned to continuously update and polish themselves. This keeps them good, and goodness is not without returns, let alone the joy of seeing successes and growths.
Teaching may not ensure material prosperity. Sometimes, think of switching the profession for rapid social or financial uplift. But everyday necessities and the desire for quick fame not suffice make you disapprove the grandeur of teaching. The fact that teachers are until humans stop learning make your presence indispensible and your profession respectable.
[Published in Educational Frontier]