A Missionary

(KYSD)

Personally, I don’t want to be a student of a student teacher. It is not that I don’t respect them, but it just makes me lazier. Well, it just depends on the student teacher if he or she could get my attention which is hard to catch. I want to learn from them anyway since I don’t want my grades to plunge into the ocean of abyssal depth, just because I didn’t listen to my student teachers. What a lame alibi.

This is why I really tried to be a teacher, it is more challenging to be standing in front of my classmates and teaching them the lessons. It is not easy to let people with the same level of your own intellect understand the lesson that are supposed to teach them, especially if the subject you are handling is Calculus. Even I am not good at it at all. I chose to (share my knowledge is not the right phrase) teach in this subject because it obliges me to study the coverage in advance. I could take advantage of this opportunity. Normally, I don’t read my Calculus book at home as a hobby or as a part of my daily routine unless we would have home works to do which should be done at home and never at school. This made me feel more responsible about my studies. That was just a feeling, but it never actually changed me.

Being a teacher is a big responsibility. That’s the greatest I ever grasped with this opportunity to give teachers their break and carry the burden (in my own perspective). I don’t know if teachers consider teaching as a burden because in the first place, why in the world would they choose it as their profession if they find it so stressful. Well, that’s just the way it is—life is empty without stress. Maybe, it’s all about the passion. But of course, money must come after the passion which can be one of the sources of motivation that drives our beloved mentors to pursue in teaching (although this is not a general thought).

Teaching can be considered as a missionary work. It is indeed a tough job based on my personal experience even though that experience was just for a day. Making lesson plans, tests and computing grades of hundreds of students or even thousands (for teachers of public schools) is a heavy job. You must deal with your students not just as students but also as a son or daughter. Teachers must know the strengths and weaknesses of their children. They should know the factors affecting their students’ learning capacity may it be financial, psychological or emotional.

I haven’t got deeper into the job of being one and haven’t known personally what it takes to be one. I am just glad that somehow I had the taste of being one. I already experienced the feeling whenever my classmates looked at me blankly when they don’t understand a thing on what I’m saying. I realized that it is not the teacher that we dislike, but the subject itself. That is the challenge of a teacher—how to stimulate their students to study a subject that they never like.

That was fun though. I would never want to die without trying the real thing.