Even if you left school years ago, you’ll still remember the nasty teachers who taught you. I also hope you can remember the wonderful ones too – the ones who inspired you to excel.
There has been a lot of recent discussion about the state of teaching in the UAE. This commentary substantiated something that many educators have known for a while – that young Emirati men rate the teaching profession low on the list of desirable jobs.
One solution offered in response was for better pay for teachers. Finland, we were told, chooses the best and the brightest to educate their valuable human capital. Certainly, we do need to look at teaching in a different light. Why do we feel that it is more prestigious to be a doctor or engineer?
Societies often forget the power that teachers have. Our greatest prophets were teachers. Without teachers would we have those doctors or engineers? When and how did this noblest of professions fall so low in the eyes of society? .
I am reminded of the power teachers have every day when I walk into classrooms in Abu Dhabi. I see tiny, bright eyed young children who are ready and eager to learn.
I have the privilege to see these children start at the beginning of the academic year knowing very little standard Arabic and English, and see them blossom into emergent speakers, readers and writers of both languages by the end of the academic year. This could not have happened without the diligence of teachers.
Research shows that one poor teacher can set back a child’s academic achievement by two to three years.
Changing the minds of younger generations to see teaching as a valuable profession will take time – and certainly increasing teachers’ wages will help.
The next step, perhaps, is to follow Unesco’s urging for countries to expand the cadre of teachers by calling for the training and use of well-qualified candidates from other careers to join the ranks of teachers.
Teaching is also about passion. In one of my favourite books, Parker J Palmer writes about having the courage to teach.
Ultimately he says, good teaching does not come from strategies or technology, but from the integrity and the identity of the teacher. We teach who we are.
When you have this passion, learning becomes about the child, and meeting the children where they are, and not about the textbook or passing standardised tests.
Teaching is hard work – don’t let anyone tell you otherwise – and without the passion, it is hard to put in the long hours, hard to devote oneself to the needs of 20 to 30 learners of varying abilities in a classroom.
For me, teaching is a vocation, a calling. Indeed, no one should force their children to go into the profession, nor should they stop the ones who do want to teach from doing so.
In the grand scheme of things we do not get paid as much as doctors or engineers, and these days we do not seem to get as much respect.
However, I find there is nothing so rewarding as teaching. There is nothing like the feeling of seeing a child’s face light up when she realises she has the ability to read. No one and nothing can take this ability away from you.
There is nothing so rewarding as seeing a student become an amazing teacher.
And there is nothing so rewarding as receiving a message from a former student who says “thank you, my teacher” along with a recording of her child reading. It makes it all worthwhile.
Patience A Sowa is an associate professor of teacher education at Zayed University, Abu Dhabi
