Professions are like clothes, we don’t look good in all of them. It is difficult to choose the ones we were born for. Those who guess which they are, or find them, are privileged, because they enjoy their work.
Teaching is one of the oldest occupations of the world, and it’s among those demanding a great deal of love, devotion and dedication.
To be a teacher you need to have the vocation of teaching and educating; patience, responsibility, selflessness and kindness are required. These necessary qualities are not learned overnight, not even from year to year or from decade to decade.
Teachers are born teachers. You can see it in the little girl who improvises a classroom in her porch and enjoys getting dirty with chalk, while writing on a bagasse cardboard blackboard and explaining to her dolls a given word or how much is two plus two.
It can also be seen in the child monitor that is left alone in the classroom and is capable of giving classes or in the one that organizes a student group and his house gets full of little friends waiting for his explanations, clearer and simpler than those of their teacher.
But vocations don’t become professions by themselves; we must lead them and foster them. Today, in Cuba, many of the children who were born teachers are engineers, graduates in foreign languages, in tourism, or are simply working as waiters, salesclerks or drivers of taxis or buses.
Many were even trained as pedagogues and then migrated to other professions. They are there, earning more money, but frustrated; in a huge dilemma as to whether to do what they like and go through hardships or be unhappy with three pesos* in their pockets.
And in classrooms, in recent years, teachers without vocation and sometimes even without training have replaced those teachers; teachers who were not born to be teachers but that received training as a matter of convenience, because it was the only way they could study a five-year university course.
Meanwhile, we continue to lose many of the good ones, the valuable ones, those who were actually an example; those in whose mirror all their students wanted to be reflected; those who sowed love for teaching in children, who turned their profession into art.
Because teachers –I’m so glad you understood- are not made in a factory, they’re not mass produced, they’re not trained any which way, they’re not created out of obligation or commitment. Teachers are born teachers, and grow and develop naturally.
And if in many places there are not enough teachers it is not because teachers born teachers are no longer born, but because they are not taken care of enough, they are not given the value they deserve, the place they should occupy.
Teachers are there, uncut. You just have to make them take interest, lead them, train them, but above all, respect them and elevate their spirit.
Many things would be better solved only by having the correct educators in classrooms, those who feel and breathe as teachers, those who not only instruct, but EDUCATE.
Teachers, I do not deny it, can be trained as such, but first they have to be born teachers!
* Peso = Cuban currency
