Another letter to the teachers
After I posted “Letter to a teacher” on my blog, I have received several emails about the issues of being teachers in a difficult situation. I read all of them and answered each person individually. Being a teacher, I understand their feelings as well as their difficulties, so I wrote this blog to express my personal feeling too.
Dear Friends,
No one says being a teacher is easy. There will be a time where some of us feel that the teaching does nothing for our students and for us. Regardless where we live, and what school that we teach, it is still a high demanding job. We think about our teaching all day and every day because we care for our students. CARING is the character of all teachers, and that is why we ARE TEACHER.
There are more things that teachers do than just teach, but few people notice. There are lesson planning for each class and efforts to grade students’ works. There is time to spend with students who need our help. There are exams and tests to be reviewed as well as reports to be written to the school principal or the Dean at the University. As teachers, we do not Just transfer the knowledge but also shape their characters. We guide them in term of honesty, integrity, courage, ethical and empathy. All of these require efforts, time and a lot of care. But besides the difficult job to balance between life and work, and between wages and standard of living, there is another emotional aspect of NOT being appreciated.
Sometimes we all get tired because of these stress, but we tell ourselves that it may come and go. But sometimes the stress stays for a longer time, and we begin to ask ourselves: “Is it worth to continue doing this? There is a time when we do not want to teach or do not have the energy to stay on this job. We tell ourselves that we have been doing this long enough, and we need to stop. But somehow we continue because we CARE. We care for our students, and we care about the future of our country. Even our physical body is exhausted, our spirit is still pushing us to go on. We want to see our students succeed. We want to see the smiles of every child in our kindergarten class. We want to hear the “Thank you teacher” from our elementary students. We want to share the happiness of our high school students when they announced: “I passed the exams.” And we want to feel the joys of our college students when they graduate. Yes, that is the only thing that we, the teachers are rewarded. But it is PRICELESS.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
