Teachers

Today I read a post on my friend's FB about teachers, where there is this one lady who quit her job in the corporate world to become a teacher and she is teaching the difficult, problematic kids and from what I read, she is one tough cookie. She is promoting the teaching malaysia program, i think. (Not really sure what that is, need to google more after this!). From what I understand, she is trying to get more people to teach as there are a LOT of kids that really need help and there are various issues that need to be addressed and vastly improved in our education system. For example, in her article she explained that some kids in Form Four still can't read and most of them don't really know how to process what they have learned. I think most of them do not know the importance of education, and even if they do, some of them are in such surroundings that are not conducive in nurturing their thirst of learning, may it be the lack of help from school or lack of family support or financial difficulties. There are so many things that can be done to overcome the problems and improved our education system. And I know the government is taking some steps in the right direction. And we, as a community, need to help in anyway we can. For example, too many times I have heard the statement" oh! He/She is just a teacher!" Or "I do not have a glamorous job, I am just a teacher". Why the word "just" have to be in the same sentence as "teacher"?, may I ask? I think most of it has to be the fact that teachers, compared to other "glamorous" professions, earn peanuts. So teachers are often seen as the lower middle class, in my opinion. So that kind of mentality is surprisingly not very helpful in promoting people to become teachers or the already existing teachers to be a much more greater educator. I admit that there are many, many teachers that are doing this not solely for money and of course, as the jaded saying goes, money is not everything but I am pretty sure teachers could do with a higher pay. The structure and state of some schools are so bad that I think I wouldn't want to be coming to the school everyday too, much less coming to teach the kids who are problematic. Some teachers are sent to schools with really bad cases and with the headache and heartache they have to face each day dealing with troubling kids, it would take a very, very dedicated teacher to march on, and the rest would march out of the school. So, maybe if the schools look nicer amd more inviting, it could lift the spirits of the teachers, and also the students! People can say that your surroundings doesn't matter if you really love your job but happy place does produce happy people, I believe! More importantly, kids with problematic behaviour need to be dealt by specially trained teachers (counselling, psychology) and not just by someone that they think are strict enough to deal with these kids. Maybe this has been done, as I have not done any research whatsoever on this, and if it has, kudos to them! Long story short, teachers are the gems of the community and while we do celebrate them by having a day dedicated especially for them, we need to change our way of thinking about teachers and also have to help them in every way we can, to help them educate our future generation.