2012 is a remarkable year for me. I became a teacher. In that very year, I finished my bachelor’s degree, practiced my teaching skills as a teacher aide and passed the licensure examination before it gave way to my permanency as a public school teacher. In spite of the ghostly pessimism that is hunting this noble profession, I was filled with perseverance, idealism, and enthusiasm to prove that indeed teaching is a noble profession.
In my four years of service in that school I gained experiences I thought I would only hear or read from documentaries and books. I experienced being an adviser for a section with 72 students, with walls having large cracks and open windows. I also had a class in a makeshift classroom where we crammed ourselves in one area during rainy days, while transferring under a tree during the warm days. I held classes in a chapel about a hundred meters from school. I taught subjects (not my field of specialization) which required me to study again and improvise most of the activities suggested in the textbooks because websites don’t work in a place where even searching phone signal is a treasure hunt.
Surely, those are anecdotes which are not new to most of us. In my four years as a high school teacher in one of the barangays of Calatrava, I realized that teaching is more than just transferring knowledge or guiding students in discovering their potentials. It is a very demanding profession which requires more than just the intellectual side of a teacher. Aside from the personal problems that teachers have to deal with, they have to assume the responsibility of somehow filling the gaps and needs of the school while standing as parents to more than a hundred students a day, each with his own troubles to tell. Teachers even sacrifice family time to prioritize work related concerns. Teachers assume all other responsibilities in accordance to the needs of their students. I realized that choosing the vocation and profession of teaching does not only require passion and inspiration, it requires conviction above all. It is a very challenging task, and with all honesty, a difficult one.
As the years advance, curriculum’s modified, systems change and those who are in the office come and go, but the concerns of today’s teachers seem to be clearer than the echo of those who have spoken before them. One of those concerns is salary increase. Do teachers get enough?
One must consider these: a lot of those who take education course are not born with silver spoon in the mouth. Many of them have to take over the role of being the breadwinner of the family. Some of them have to assume the responsibility of their parents in sending their siblings to school. Others have to pay debts their parents acquired to support their studies, something that they have to pay before they could even get their first salary.
Teaching is not just about money, indeed. There are certain things that money cannot buy such as the selflessness and loyalty of a teacher to his or her job. There is a sense of fulfilment in this job that makes teachers enduring. But one must face the fact that in times of financial crisis, a teacher is just like any other normal entity that needs money. Teachers have basic needs to survive.
Perhaps, teaching is not just a noble profession. It is also a heroic profession. It is a task of facing battles against ignorance. It is a task of facing the personal battles of each learner while resolving their own personal battles in life.
There is a famous quotation by an anonymous author which is often presented in seminars and talks for teachers. It says, “A good teacher is like a candle, it consumes itself to light the way for others.” If teachers are candles that consume themselves, there will come a time when they would completely melt away, consumed, exhausted, and burnt out. Let them burn brighter without being destroyed. They need support.