World Teacher’s Day is recognised by Queensland teachers on Friday, 28 October to highlight the all-important role they play in educating our future generation.
World Teachers Day, also known as International Teachers Day, was initiated in 1994 and is generally commemorated on 5th October. The event is linked to a 1966 UNESCO recommendation that focusses on the setting of standards for teachers around the globe.
In Australia, teachers in all states and territories had been invited to partake and the public spotlight was firmly trained on the vital contribution teachers make – not only in educating the next generation but also helping to guide our young minds in their social and emotional maturation during the course of their years at school.
Some schools marked the day with special activities, others took a more reflective approach, but all recognized that the role of teachers extends well beyond being just an educator; and that applies whether posted to metropolitan, regional or remote schools.
Pupils and students are young people and adolescents in the making and while they progress through the grades, both mentally and physically, have a raft of needs and will often externalise character traits that present challenges for teaching professionals.
Young people are questioning, probing, exploring, daydreaming and, dare I say, at times pushing the boundaries and teachers are trained to steer them safely through those troubled waters.
Even in the most favourable of economic conditions, schools are places where hardships in some families are exposed, where fellow students and teachers become willing safety nets for the disadvantaged and for those seeking their little place in a fast-moving world, yearning for approval, nurture and encouragement.
2022 has to date seen what most of us would probably view as a year of yet more challenges on the heels of the ongoing Covid pandemic.
The rampant and highly virulent disease has laid bare weaknesses in most institutional systems, yet teachers have faced them head-on, be that by safeguarding the health of students, providing learning support and resources for remote learning and being there for students who needed extra motivation.
And – it must be added that not only teachers stepped up to the plate, but parents too put in the hard yards, especially during times of isolation and remote learning, when they needed to re-arrange work hours to simply be there for their sons and daughters to complete remote learning tasks.
Many a teacher can relate stories of parents feeling the weight on their shoulders when trying to digest learning material some of which would have been totally foreign to them.
For the teachers themselves, the pandemic called upon all their energies. In many instances, they did not only prepare daily lessons over the net, but did so while still teaching small numbers in the classroom.
Having attended many a Year 12 graduation ceremony in my nearly four decades in journalism and having had the privilege of reporting on students’ scholastic and extracurricular successes, there seemed to run one common thread in the majority of speeches delivered by school leavers – namely their palpable appreciation for what teachers had indeed imparted upon them, namely resilience, loyalty to classmates, pride in their school and with it, a certain lament about those school years having finally come to an end.
A number of students would readily offer, during an at times teary statement, namely that teachers are educators and teachers foremost, yet every so often slip into the role of sounding boards, generous givers of praise, advocates and persons passing on sage advice.
