9/10/1026
Today is Teachers' Day in China.
I think we sometimes idealize the teaching profession. We like to believe that a child may forget individual lessons, homework assignments, or test scores, but remember the teacher who encouraged him when he was struggling, noticed that he was shy, praised his curiosity, or treated him with unusual kindness. In reality, that teacher rarely exists.
There is certainly a bit truth in that. Teachers don't just teach subjects. They can leave lasting impressions on the children they teach.
This may be especially true of elementary-school teachers, who play a very different role from college professors. An elementary-school teacher is not only teaching reading, mathematics, or science. Ideally, he or she is also helping a child discover how to learn and how to see himself as a learner.
At that age, children are still forming some very basic beliefs:
Am I good at learning? Is school a place where I belong? What happens when I make a mistake?
Do adults believe in me? Am I capable of doing difficult things?
A teacher's positive response to these questions can stay with a child for years.
Someone once asked me to name a teacher I still remember decades later—someone who had a far-reaching impact on my life.
Sadly, I couldn't name one.
That made me wonder: How many of us can actually remember our elementary-school teachers, decades after leaving their classrooms?
Perhaps not as many as we might expect. I'm not even sure how many of my children's elementary-school teachers they still remember today.
This makes me think differently about Teachers' Day.
Teachers certainly deserve appreciation. But I wonder whether we sometimes give teachers too much credit for shaping a child's life while overlooking the people who are there long before school begins and long after the school day ends.
A child's first teacher is usually a parent.
Parents teach not through formal lessons, but through everyday life: how to treat other people, how to respond to difficulty, how to handle mistakes, how to work, how to care, and what it means to be responsible. More importantly, children learn by watching their parents.
A teacher may spend several hours a day with a child for a few years. Parents are usually the child's most constant teachers and role models from the very beginning.
So perhaps Teachers' Day should remind us not only to appreciate teachers, but also to recognize the parents who are doing the teaching every day—without a classroom, a lesson plan, or even realizing that they are teaching.
Before a child ever has a teacher at school, he already has one at home.
