What is the definition of a teacher?
Wiki it and you find: In education, teachers facilitate student learning, often in a school or academy. The objective is typically a course of study, lesson plan, or a practical skill, including learning and thinking skills.
Simply put, I will just say that a teacher is someone who teaches. Period.
(No wonder I cannot make it into the wiki team)
Maybe I can even add that a teacher is one who teaches what the Ministry requires the students to learn.
The ideal model of a teacher will be one who is able to teach well. Spurs the students on, stimulate the students' interest in the respective subject. He must not be teaching for the sake of teaching-- or worst, for the sake of money. And patience patience patience.
Passing down knowledge is not easy, and not every teacher can do that well. Notice I didn't say "a teacher have to be well-conducted"! That's a grey area I is not ready to probe into. E.g. Can a teacher dye his/her hair? Can a teacher go to a nightclub? Can a teacher have tattoos? ...etc. All I can say now is: A teacher must be morally upright. Because afterall, a teacher have to set an example mah. I want to say to heck with tattoos and dyed hairs, what matters is the character. But then images of kids sitting in class with punk hairstyles and tattoos appear, and I must say I waver in my stand.
Anyway, I believe a teacher is more than just teaching the syllables. I believe (here goes) that a good teacher has to teach his/her students about life itself, too.
I can hear people screaming, "It's already hard enough to allow the student to understand multiples of 5, you nincompoop! Now you want us to teach those (censored) kids about (censored) life?? LIFE??"
I don't mean life as in life. I mean those little things in life. I remembered my teacher telling us whether to brush our teeth before or after breakfast. Or what we should do if ever we meet a flasher. Or how we should handle the affairs of the heart. Or what sex is really like so we don't go probing in the wrong channel.
Things like that, very simple things in our everyday life. My secondary school principal is very very good in this. In my lower secondary days he would tell the whole school a motivational story every week. He didn't tell stories anymore during my upper secondary years, but every week during assembly he would still give motivational talk. He would assign a virtue for every month E.g. honesty, fortitude, blah blah, and promote them. I cannot remember them exactly but I know the values are already in me. He really inspires me, not to become someone great, but just to be a good person.
And recently I realised this professor in my division does this too. She will tell us, for e.g., that when moving past people to our seats in cinemas, we should not move in with our back facing them. She will tell us the proper method of writing letters to important people. She will tell us that everyone needs a principle in life to adhere to and follow; it may be a religion, it may be something past that, but either way there must be something for us to stick to.
Simple things. Too simple for a uni student, you may say. And yet we see uni students refusing to give up seats to the needy in trains and buses.
I salute these teachers =))
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Learning abt life is never simple. Thats why it's always neglected, cos ppl tends to avoid things they are not good at.
Good teachers teach us things we are not good at. Subjects. Formulae. Life.
Yay. (ok, random.)