What Being a Teacher, Teaches You About Yourself

Give it a few months and, as a teacher, you will find that you are teaching in more ways than one. While inspiring and molding young sponge-like minds, incrementally you will probably find yourself becoming your own fountain of wisdom. What follows are some examples of lessons that I otherwise may never have learnt, had I not been a teacher.

Your Tolerance Threshold

Whether you are a disciplinarian or not, there will always be kids that climb under your skin as if they knew exactly which buttons to press and when to press them. There will be angels too of course, but it’s the demons that can make or break a class. As a first, it’s important to understand and have compassion for why your students act out, but this does not mean you should encourage or tolerate it.

Kids need a healthy balance of freedom and boundaries. Knowing what your boundaries should be will surface naturally as students test them. And so the more we teach, the more we realise what values are most important to us.

Self Compassion

This is something you can come to learn while working with any vulnerable clientele. No more than children though, do we feel a sense of clemency and benevolence for the innocent versions of ourselves.

As adults we are much more keenly aware than our naive younger selves of which students are less popular and which the misfits are. Once identified, you can’t help but feel a bias towards helping them. Though you don’t want to be obvious about it, you give them little encouraging nudges.

The more you help this student, the more you realise how many great qualities they have no matter how different they are (cliché alert) and that so do you! As an adult we are still those misfits, we are just in a bigger pond where we can find companion misfits.

Teach the Change You Want to See in the World

This is actually a quote I’ve stolen from Gandhi (apologies for the copyright infringement). “Be the change you wish to see in the world”. Well how about teaching it? I realized that these classes were the ones I was most passionate about; the ones where I taught stuff that would inspire my kids to be better people and create good and better things for the world. This is, after all, what education is about.

At least, it shouldn’t be about just getting your students to know things, but to use that knowledge to make the world a better place. So how do you want to make the world a better place?

You could do this just by teaching your students better fluency to help them be a more global citizen, or teaching them confidence through speaking skills. Perhaps, you just want to teach them the value of creativity. It’s whatever you envision for the world.

Creativity is the Fruit of your Happiness

Well, creativity as we all know is pretty awesome but is it really at the crux of happiness? Well here’s how I see it. Surely, we would only create, if we loved our world enough to want to add to it. Therefore, being creative is really just showing our vigor for life. Students are really in their prime when they are creating something. Most notably when it’s something they relate to or when creating something funny (see next point).

But I think creativity is something that has been lacking from the greater part of our education’s history. Lecture, listen, take a test. This routine has not only limited learning but stifled individuality and creativity. There’s a great TED talk on this by Ken Robinson, so don't just take it from me, you should hear from a professional.

There are More Things to Laugh About Than to Not

Making your students laugh is the single best way to get your students to remember something. Whether or not you are naturally funny, they always find things to laugh and make a joke about. All you have to do is make the class a trusting environment so they feel relaxed enough to make jokes. And you’ll realise that from humour will flow connection and desire to learn.

You personally then learn, to laugh more. Because laughing more also means learning more. Too much messing around can be counterproductive, but I’m of the school of thought that stifling laughter is just mean. So, if your student makes a joke, laugh even if you don’t find it that funny, tell the joke again the next day- trust me, they’ll like you better and you’ll feel better for that little connection.