‘MA’AM, YOU DROPPED YOUR CHALK’
Perhaps I shall start with this cliché statement, I have never treated ‘teaching’as a profession, but rather a passion. It is the passion of having to help students climb the next step of the ladder; but do you know why I chose to start with this cliché introduction? Simply because the art of teaching is cliché itself: you teach students, get attached to them, see them graduate and the whole process starts over again. Nonetheless, this cliché art is the seed of the great posterity in the future nation.
Whenever I enter my class, I don’t see my students as mere kids, I treat them with individuality. This happens most especially when I require the children to recite, I do not just call them by their last name and know them by their names only... I have a certain concept of uniqueness planted on them. For example, when I call a child to write his or her answer on the blackboard, I mumble inside the back of my mind that ‘this child will become a future educator, because he knows how to encourage others’or ‘this student could become a journalist in the future, because he knows how to speak well in front of other people’.
Being a Master Teacher in the field of English, I know that there is more to teaching than just lecture. Teaching does not only mean to implant knowledge into the students, it also makes use of wisdom. I am not just a teacher, but their second mother too. I am not just someone who walks inside the classroom and teaches them the whole grammatical or literature concepts, but rather someone who would also want the students to say in one click that, “This teacher... I am inspired by her, I want to persevere because I wanted to be like her someday”.
Behind the curtains of a teacher’s desk, stands a fervent woman who have a passionate intensity to mold students into the potential that they could become. An educator is not just an educator, he or she is the blacksmith that forges the student into the piercing sword that they could become. He or she is the power source if the student is a PC-set. In a rather typical meaningful summarization, we are the ones that pushes students how to become their potential.
“Ma’am, you dropped your chalk,” a student leaned towards me to pick up the chalk that I have dropped. “Thank you anak,” I answered him. Perhaps, you will be the next person to hold this chalk in front of your own students someday.
The author is Master Teacher of Mabalacat City — oOo— I at Camachiles National High School, Division