Teacher’s reflections
Contemplating the Department of Education’s (DepEd) theme for this year’s celebration of World Teachers Day, “My Teacher,
My Hero!,” I wonder how teachers value the time they spend in their professional and personal lives.
Time as a construct may be unfathomable to understand. Hence, I framed my reflections using the four letters of the word TIME.
Treasure
Teaching is a profession and not a high-paying job. But time gives us a resource that allows us to earn that stamp of approval, paying off our earnest efforts.
Investment
As teachers, we spend days with students trying to figure out their potential, honing their skills and talents, giving them opportunities to grow from their mistakes, and hoping that they turn out to be the best they could be.
As colleagues, we commit ourselves in individual or group mentoring activities.
As school leaders, we take care of the faculty to promote improvement and best practices in pedagogy and curriculum.
As members of our family, we give our share in achieving family goals from simple household chores to attending family celebrations, to the more complex sharing of feelings and emotions.
As members of the community, we give life to more advanced sets of values.
Management
As one prepares for class, we teachers work the busiest prior to the actual teaching. Every detail of the teaching repertoire follows specific theories, each learning activity brings forth
a scaffold that gradually promotes the learner to see and understand more complex levels of relationships, and connections between facts and ideas.
Education
In the course of our academic life, we learned that the basics in kindergarten are the foundation of the things we ought to practice in our daily life as exemplified in the essay by Robert
Fulghum “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.”
- Share everything.
- Play fair.
- Don’t hit people.
- Put things back where you found them.
- Clean up your own mess.
- Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
- Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
- Wash your hands before you eat.
- Flush.
- Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
- Live a balanced life — learn some and drink some and draw some and paint some and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
- Take a nap every afternoon.
- When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
- Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
- Goldfish and hamster and white mice and even the little seed in the styrofoam cup — they all die. So do we.
- And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned — the biggest word of all — LOOK.
Time therefore is not just our treasure, investment, management strategy, or education. It is something that defines who we are. It is our life.
EMMANUEL M. BATULAN, mathematics facilitator, UST Junior High School
