Teaching goes beyond the profession
A lot of attention has been put on education and not much on the educator or teacher. Education is both systematic and progressive and without education or learning, an individual is bound to become a public nuisance. Nelson Mandela once said that ‘Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.’ And truly for the world to change, much more emphasis needs to be put on education and teaching.
For education to take place, there must be a teacher, and sometimes life is our teacher and other times it is individuals. We must learn that teaching goes beyond the profession. A teacher has been defined as a person who helps students to acquire knowledge, competence or virtue. So it`s not about the profession as much as it is about the person. It has been discovered that the first teacher any child has is his/her mother. Right from the womb, the fetus begins to pick signals from their mother and these signals are translated to affect their development. It’s the individuals that we meet on a daily that become teachers to us because from our various interactions with them, we learn to deal with many stresses and how to relate with people.
Teaching goes beyond the profession because, for a teacher to have a long-lasting impact, there must be passion, love, vision, a dream and the game-changer attitude within a person. A true teacher looks beyond what they will benefit from the service that they give and focus on what the learner has to gain. The beauty of it is that we don`t need to sit in classrooms for us to be teachers or learners because every day we meet potential teachers and students. It is our attitude towards them that determines what they will at the end of the interaction, walk away with.
Love and hatred, morality and ethics, good and bad, kindness and mercy; all these are not taught and learnt in a classroom. Some of these are learnt on the streets, others in market places and others from inconvenient places.
It means that we are all students and we are all teachers. We will always be teachers because it is our experiences that we teach and impart into others. Our interactions with others, the places we have been to and the events that take place in our lives make us teachers.
Some people choose to take up the teaching profession so that they can mentor, guide and impart skills into others as a way of changing them. Then some people are teachers at heart, and they go out of their way to make it possible for other people to become better. They source out for information that will empower others, and they look beyond the situations and limitations they might face and adopt better means of engaging their learners.
Many of these teachers fall under the informal education sector and they teach tremendously well. They teach soft skills, vocational skills, morals, ethics and values in society that group the emotional and psychological being of many individuals.
Now that you know that you are a teacher and the world is full of your students, you must build upon yourself and your interaction with the world. Become intentional about everything that you do because like it or not, the world is watching. And even though not everyone may care, there is a high probability that many people are picking the signals that you give off and these inform their world views. Be kind.
Sometimes we want to share our skills and are passionate about making an impact on hearts that are ready and willing to receive from us but we are limited by whom to contact. Look and believe, then you will see those grounds. And if it so happens that you are not a teacher by profession, find a community to volunteer. Talk to the local leaders in a particular region, let them know what your passion is and the motivation behind it and set it rolling.
If your passion stirs the desire to travel in order to do so, don`t hesitate, take a bus or a plane and travel to the grounds that will receive the seed you want to sow. We are sure that there are many people with a desire to learn but have limited access to teachers. These will gladly receive you with open hands.
You could visit Volunteering in Uganda and let us give you the opportunity to teach under our community Development Program . Be it a skill, a story, a song or any lesson that is valuable and relevant for the social, mental and spiritual development of the child and other community members; we will avail the learners to you.
We are all teachers because it is much more than the profession. So let`s teach and forever learn.
