Dear friends! Since 1994, October 5 has been celebrated as International Teacher Day by all world community and my country is not an exception. I have to say that Teacher Day had been celebrated in Ukraine long before. I remember my being a schoolgirl and congratulating my teachers on this day and it was many many years ago! Anyway,this holiday exists and I'd like to express my mind in this connection. Hope, you don't mind.
When I was young and full of ambitions, I was eager to become an outstanding scientist and if somebody had told me I was going to become a teacher and to be a good one, I wouldn't have believed him or talked to him any more.That time it sounded like an offence! Honestly, I made a good scientist. But, the more I learned and the more professional I bacame, the stronger I felt a desire to give my knowledge back. And I started teaching my university students one day. It turned out to be my true vocation, my true mission, my true love. Since then, I have dedicated all my life to teaching and I have never felt sorry for that! Nothing can give more satisfaction than seeing your students gaining their knowledge! It can be compared only with raising your own kids! I still remember and respect my school and university teachers who taught me not only sciense. Actually, they created me like a sculptor creates his statues of raw material and I am so very thankful for what they did! They gave me understanding of life, capability of using my brains in the right way, taught me logic, common sense, thirst of knowledgeand so on and so on. Unfortunately, most of my teachers have already passed away but I am really happy that I managed to express them my great thankfulness during their lives.
Well, back to the topic. Should we show and tell our respect to teachers on Teacher Day only and why?
As far as I know, in Oriental countries as well as in Arabic, a teacher is a person number one, always respected, always honored. So, why is in our "most progressive', "most modern" West culture a teacher somebody taken for granted? We are so spoiled with millenium history of education in Europe that we don't even think there is someone who gave us original knowledge. We don't value teachers. They get miserable salaries and try to find well-paid jobs in other sectors. According to statistics data, in 2015 educational system will lack 35,000 teachers in Ukraine only. And it is general trend all over Europe. So the question is: do we think that all children are born genious and need no teachers from now on? If NO, we should pay more attention to our educational system and never think it is perfect. There is no limit of perfection.
Well, I don't want to stop at the sad note. I will show you how we celebrate this day. Here are our best teachers receiving government awards (on the right).
After an official part there is always a concert (on the left).
Nothing is so bad until there is someone you can trust and learn from.
Dear teachers all over the world! I sincerely congratulate you with our professional holiday. What you give your students is priceless and I wish the society valuated us higher than dockers and truck drivers! Anyway, these flowers are for you!
Comments
sometimes i ask my students too whether they have read this or that book and whether they have heard of a well-known movie director or a song famous all over the world and when i see that puzzled look in their eyes i get irritated too...i really wonder when they are going to read all those books you have mentioned and even more...we have grown up on them.....some of those classics even need to be read more than ones...at different stages of one's life....to get the real point of view what the author wanted to share with us...nowadays ...teens are real robots or cyber ''maniacs'' or ''like-experts''.....or selfie makers....they read only comments and speak only about MONEY and fashion and sports....too sad!.
Tanya i have always enjoyed all your blogs and here is another one which gave me a real satisfaction while reading it, because here you have raised issues whcih are actual in former Soviet Union countries, such as a developing country as Armenia. But unlike your teachers or united teachers our armenian ones are not that much brave to raise a low salary question to the government's attention, it seems we all are satisfied with what we get monthly....anyway....
Happy teacher's day..we also celebrate it on the fifth of October , and sometimes even a little earlier, for example we had a party in a restaurant ...the whole teachers' staff was there ...we danced a lot and had really fun, but the saddest point is that we had to pay for ourselves....lolzzzzz.....that's the way our government congratulated us....(i mean it didnt congratulate us at all, whatever we did , we did it on our own)...
My dear friends! Thank you very much for your congratulations ang great comments! I think the problem of education is urgent all over the world. We live in the days of high technologies being developed so rapidly that a regular person can't keep up with them without special training. But even in ancient times there wouldn't have been Alexander, the Great if there hadn't been Aristotle.
Mr.Bob, you are so right when you say that bad conditions for teaching cause another very dramatic problem: teachers of low quality, especially at public schools. In my opinion, it is not just tragedy, it is catastrophy!If a student of a high school who has been taught English for 5-6 years, can't construct a primitive sentence "The book is on the table" or "There are 5 people in the room" or "It is cold", I immediately feel inexpugnable desire to ask his teacher WHY he/she decided to be a teacher. The answer is obvious: he/she can't work any other job! How could the modern well-educated society come to this point?! It is my understanding, that a bad teacher is even worse than a bad doctor. If the latter treats his patient badly, a patient may die. Despite pricelessness of any human life, one death will make no harm on the global basis of the mankind. But if we have bad teachers, we will have not only bad doctors but also bad plane, car, bridge, etc. constructors, bad economists, bad politics and, at last, more bad teachers. It is a closed disk, the dead end! If the society doesn't start paying more attention to the educational problems, our hope for new generations may turn into aversion for bad eggs!
Rajesh! I am really glad to hear from you! Sure, you are right. But, unfortunately, I have to say that even united teachers can't do much. I remember the srike declared by the teachers of my university, the leading technical university in my country. Honestly, it was a political stike but one of our demands was to raise teachers' salaries that were not enough to provide for one person, not to say about families. And I tell you, if 10 thousand of our students hadn't supported us and hadn't gone on hunger strike just on the main square of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, we wouldn't have been heard by our government!
It is so painful to realize that our modern society is going to raise IT monsters who have never read anything except computer manuals. Teens have no idea about "Three Musketeers", "Crime and Punishment", "The man and the sea", "Gone with the wind". They don't even watch movies! I am afraid to ask if they know Jack London, Mark Twain, Alexander Duma, even Mel Gibson. Perhaps, they think I ask them about football or baseball players! So, where are we moving?! In one of Stephan King's books is a phrase:"The roof of the world has moved off" and it seems not to be fantastic any longer!
Well, thaks everybody for taking part in this discussion! I do appreciate your common sense and good will!
Thanks a ton for sharing your within view, dear teacher Tanya! And, my thanks to those creator who create teachers like you!
I wonder if the condition of this world is so poor today, because, we are lacking good teachers. (wondering)
Teachers are the builders of nation's intelligence and character. And, it's the time to show what teachers can do. They are real builders and if they stand up together, they can rebuild our lost culture.
I wish, I could see our lost culture back again, where I can see the role of a guru (teacher) which I only read in scriptures now.
Very Happy Teachers' Day To All Teachers!
My view is like yours, Tanya. If the next generation is our hope for the future, why would we be content to let them have overcrowded classrooms and underpaid teachers. The teachers who continue teaching under bad circumstances are either the most dedicated people (some have other income so they can keep teaching) or the other kind of teachers that you get with bad conditions are teachers of low quality.
Happy Teacher's Day. You and teachers all over the world deserve all the accolades and praise. You and all the teachers are the one who are molding the younger generations. Congratulations.
hello my friend Tanya
my congratulations from the deep of my heart for all teachers and you on
International Teacher Day
Nice one