Teacher teacher at Deadpoet’s Cave

It’s that time of the year.

Teachers Day is around the corner. Otterman links to a teacher who hates teaching and another who elaborates on this.

I am not an authority on teachers and teaching. But I know people many who teach: friends who have become or training to become teachers, and teachers who have become friends. The most significant of which is my significant other. She responds, saying why she does not hate teaching, offering a different take on the issues raised by Trisha Reloaded and Flying Low.

Glancing through their blogs, I feel they’re not generally pessimistic. In fact, in Flying Low’s next post, she rebuts herself:

Why I love teaching? …it makes a difference. It could be as minute as cheering the students up after a bad day at home or as big as helping a student turn his life around. But being the person a school-going child is most in contact with outside his family, we are going to have an impact on his life. Perhaps we cannot “save” all our students, but we can at least help some.

And [that] is why I still teach and why I plan to continue to teach after my Masters. Even if my students never learn the difference between past perfect and present perfect, I would still be happy if they all they remembered was that someone cared for them during their secondary school life.

Trisha seems to be a reflective and thoughtful teacher. Much ado about hair cracked me up. This sms exchange follows a botched teacher-stylist haircut:

Me: I am very sorry about your hair. Hope it can be salvaged.
J: It’s OK la. I can correct it and make it nice again.
Me: Don’t give me another opportunity to cut your hair ok?
J: Haha. OK OK.

Which leads me to this. Teachers and teaching have really changed since I was in primary school. Secondary school even. Yes, there were teachers who were cool and who managed to be close to most of the students. Yet the idea of teachers sharing their mobile numbers or MSN contacts with their students seems quite alien to me. (Yes, and I’m supposed to be dealing with educational technology.)

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This time of the year is also the anniversary of passing of the most influential teacher in my life.

About three years ago, Miss Joyce Tan passed away.

I was studying in Melbourne then. I didn’t meet her when I was back in Singapore at the end of 2002 for the holidays. I didn’t get to say goodbye because I was stuck in Australia.

You shaped my gift for words. But now, I am bereft of them.

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