Congratulations !

Dear colleagues,

On behalf of the English team I would like to congratulate you on our professional holiday – Teacher’s Day. Among all our holidays it’s the most touching and the richest in flowers, words, hugs, and happy tears. It’s the holiday when we remember all the teachers who on one way or another have influenced our career and sometimes our way of life and thinking. Teachers are sacred people and to be a teacher is to be a friend, encourager, counsellor, mentor, expert in everything, facilitator, cultural bearer, as well as a master of our own subject.

Faced with sometimes overcrowded classrooms, very tighten budget and great expectations you nevertheless have great desire and keep on working magic with your students. You not only instruct and teach them but also often help obtain confidence in life, inspire them with your enthusiasm and example of your own devotion you conduct your lessons in creative and dynamic way to catch the attention of the whole class or sometimes tailor your teaching to individual students with a lot of different learning secrets and miracles. You have chosen the most challenging and the most rewarding profession. It doesn’t give you much money, but it gives you more – the light and love in your pupils’ eyes, the smile on the face when something is at last understood and grasped, the joy and pride watching your students at their graduation, a lot of thanks from grateful parents and finally your internal satisfaction that it is you who has made the difference and done something important.

I would like to close up with great words said by Haim Ginott “I’ve come to a frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher I possess a tremendous power to make a person’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humour, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a person humanized or de-humanized.” Opening the door of our classroom let’s always keep these words in mind.

To be a teacher is …

Two years ago I graduated from the University and after that I started working at school. I must admit that being a teacher isn’t easy. Besides I think that teaching is a real challenge to your character, abilities and talent. I suppose you must have a real vocation. Because it is very hard not to get out of patience, to be gentle and friendly, to work every day persistently so that you can give all your knowledge to children. To be a good teacher you must be genuinely interested in what you are doing.

Teaching is a constant stream of decisions. It means where the children are there is also something new, unknown and unexpected and interesting that always evokes different decisions.

I might as well add that this sort of work demands great patience. As for me it is very difficult to get up at a very early hour and to go to bed at least at 11:30 pm with no rest in between. Besides the teacher has to be able to withstand being confident in an air tight classroom for six hours with twenty-one “monsters” and to correct 103 term papers. And some other examples that demand great patience:

• patience when a pupil asks to repeat the directions the teacher has just repeated for someone else;

• patience when the kids forget their lunch money for the fourth day in a row;

• patience when one third of the class fails the test;

• patience when the text books haven’t arrived and the semester starts tomorrow and many others.

But … after your parents your teacher may be the most important person in your life. Moreover I can say the teacher is like the second mother. As it is she who brings up in children such qualities as responsibility, respect, industry, persistence and enthusiasm; she teaches them to be attentive to other people, to appreciate love, kindness, honesty, charity. In my opinion, she can even mould their character. And besides she may also sacrifice for the sake of children.

After parents a teacher may be the most important person in a kid’s life. Moreover I can say the teacher is the second mother as it is she who brings up in children such qualities as responsibility, persistence and enthusiasm; she teaches them to be attentive to other people, to appreciate love, kindness, honesty, charity. In my opinion, she can even mould her pupil’s characters.

And what about our pupils? What do they think about us, their teachers? It seemed to me appropriate to ask them: What makes a good teacher of English? Despite the diversity of pupils the responses were as follows:

• thorough knowledge of the subject; as one pupil said: “It doesn’t matter how nice a teacher is if she doesn’t know what she’s talking about”;

• how the teacher goes about imparting that knowledge, in other words, methodology; what the pupils requested most often was a variety of activities within a lesson:

“If we just do drills, I fall asleep.”

“It’s nice when you have a little grammar, and then a dictation, and then some reading or a discussion.”

“Discussions and debates are my favourite way of learning.”

• a sense of humour and teacher’s ability to take the tension out of the process of learning English:

“If she can laugh once in a while, you don’t get so nervous about making mistakes”.

“ When the teacher is smiling at you, you want to make another try.”

• how well the teacher is prepared for the lesson;

• a conscientious attitude toward pupils’ papers;

• discipline (although mentioned specifically by only a few, was hinted at by many);

• over half of the pupils had something to say about the pupil-teacher relationship. Most often, they expressed a desire for a sympathetic teacher who “remembers what is was like to be a pupil”. They felt that the teacher should “know each pupil as an individual” and there was a frequent demand for justice: “She only talks to the best pupils. Doesn’t she know I’m trying?”

A significant number of pupils expressed a fear of being embarrassed by teacher’s caustic wit: “They ought to be polite to us. We are people, too”;

- almost half of the pupils had something to say about the character of the teacher. A majority of the responses praised a teacher who is confident and who obviously enjoys his/her profession.

• a teacher’s voice was also mentioned:

“It shouldn’t be monotonous, too.”

“You have to hear him/her in the back row.”

- a teacher’s appearance: “She’s always neatly dressed. It makes things business-like”.

But as one understanding pupil wrote: “A good teacher is someone who tries to do everything I have listed above. But I understand that teachers are only people like me”.

I reckon that it is very important to know what they think about us and we, teachers, have to take into consideration their opinions. Why? Because when we know what they want it helps us to become a perfect teacher.