“Why Do You Teach?”

August 9, 2017 by Hania Youssef

"Why do you teach?" A question I am asked in every job interview I have. The only image I get in my mind before I automatically answer "I love teaching" is what my relatives used to say when I was a little kid, "She looks like a teacher or a headmistress!" It is true. I cannot imagine myself working as something else and be as happy and efficient as I am - other than being a teacher. Being in a classroom is the one place that makes me feel truly useful and quite alive. I happen to have a talent for the English language and a good ability to simplify things to whoever wants to learn. I realized this early on in my life. Seeing how good I can be, I was encouraged to pursue teaching as a solid career.

For me, teaching is not entering a classroom with a book and a marker ready to impart whatever information you have onto students, and then leave to do the exact same thing in the next one. In my humble opinion, it is more of a way of living. It is a way of influencing young people; leaving a print on them somehow. It is a great opportunity to contribute in shaping the hearts and minds of students, no matter how old they are. It is a golden chance to teach them to make the best of themselves. After all this is how we have turned out into the people we are now; being influenced by our parents and teachers' teachings, or at least the ones we really remember from our many years of studying. This is my aim; becoming a teacher who is hard to forget.

That's why I strongly believe that teaching is not only a demanding and tense job, but also a very dangerous one. Being a teacher is simply like being a doctor. One can either be good, compassionate and conscientious enough to save a patient's life, or be careless, uninformative and indifferent to cause severe harm to the brain and heart of a patient. The picture that Charles Dickens portrayed in his great novel HARD TIMES, of a teacher and education in general, I totally resent. Students are definitely not vessels to be opened and filled with facts without being appreciated, speculated about or simply questioned. Students are human beings of different ages, gender, backgrounds and abilities. They have various mentalities to grasp and personalities to shape. They don't need a robot teacher with A-star information to give. They yearn- unconsciously- for a person with an interesting character; some kind of charisma to attract their attention for at least 40 minutes. Once he or she succeeds in doing this, then success in delivering any information is granted.

Keeping this in mind, I have had the privilege of teaching for 13 years now. I have had the chance to deal with different ages and backgrounds; each presented a new challenge for me. Activities, group work and getting the students to voice their own opinion in verbal or written form have proven, time and again, to be a great way of teaching. It doesn't only get the students involved, but it also gets them to learn and use the language in a subtle way. It was also evident in how they improved as people; becoming more outgoing, more responsible, and confident and having no problem in speaking their minds in an organized way.

Nowadays, more and more people believe that education in general is overrated, especially since the political and educational environment in our country have been not only rocky, but also corrupt for so many years. So why would people care? Why would they bother giving their children a good education when the result is more or less the same? Why would teachers exert effort in teaching when the gain is not always great? The only answer that always comes to my mind is that because we are alive. This is life. Babies are born every second; they grow to become men and some to become the leaders of our future. It is the duty, of those who see in themselves the ability to teach, towards others to implant good seeds in as many people as they can whenever they can. We owe it to them and to ourselves not to lose hope. This is the only way our lives, future and country will be better. Call me an optimist, a romantic, I don't know. But this is the way I remember all the teachers that affected me. This is the way I would like my students to remember me; a human being that helped them not only love and acquire the English language, but also teach them something else apart from the language that they will take with them for the rest of their lives.