By Rachid Khouya
By Rachid Khouya
Morocco World News
Rabat, Morocco, January 31, 2013
When we teach, we rarely put into our minds that the students we teach today will be our colleagues one day. A decade in the life of a teacher, as is the case in the life of a nation, is not that long. You open your eyes and you close them and here we are working with the students we used to teach and with teachers who will work soon with the students they teach too.
A year will come, soon or later, when you open your shop/classroom to find out that an ex-student of yours is also opening a similar shop’s door on your left or on your right. You will find him/her sitting beside you in the teacher’s waiting room, sharing the same concerns, the same reality, the same job, the same salary and talking to you about the person you used to be.
What would you want to hear from those ex-students when you meet them or when they will meet you in the future when they become doctors, engineers, taxi-drivers, mechanics, fathers, mothers and citizens of tomorrow?
What will you tell them to justify the ill-treatment, the harshness, the badness, the exploitation and the stupidity and laziness you chose as a teaching style and as a living strategy when you were teaching them? What a bad situation to avoid!
This happened to me and it is still happening especially when I meet some students of mine who are teachers today. I feel so happy when i see them walking wearing the white “uniform” talking to their students and teaching them. That reminds me of all my ex teachers, both the good and the bad ones.
I see myself as a student of theirs and I feel happier when they tell me, and tell my students too and my colleagues, about things that they still remember from my classrooms a decade ago. I feel joyful and thankful because they remind me of things I forgot and of things I, normally, should not forget, of beautiful and funny situations that should be written in our books of professional development and professional history book.
Believe me, I feel happy because what they remember are good memories, nice, funny jokes and events. I forgot them for sure but they seem to be our historians writing our history. That is why we should always be aware that when we teach, we do not only write dates on the board and on the students’ copybooks. Indeed, we write our and their history textbooks.
The Dalali Lama wrote in his Becoming Enlightened that “if you are a teacher, before sitting down to teach Imagine your own teacher on the place from which you will be speaking and bow three times, thereby showing reverence for the source of your teachings and for the teachings themselves.”
He adds that “as a teacher you should have sufficient training in morality such that your senses are controlled. Otherwise your senses will be like wild horses. Pulling you into unfit actions,” they will also be “providing antidotes to the three poisons of lust, hatred, and ignorance.”
In other words, today’s teachers should teach their students without forgetting that toady’s learners will be tomorrow’s colleagues and the future’s teachers and the future’s future itself.
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