Celebrating the teacher

Earlier this month, on 5 October, the world marked World Teachers Day (WTD), an annual event since 1994. The theme UNESCO set for WTD 2020 was “Teachers: Leading in Crisis, Reimagining the Future.”

Teachers have indeed led in crisis as they faced the unprecedented challenge of working under precarious conditions imposed by COVID-19 pandemic. According to secondary school physics teacher Wafaa Fouad, the past school year was especially challenging. “We had to do double work. First to learn how to explain the subject to students online and second, to help them adapt to e-learning and doing research instead of totally depending on school textbooks.”

In appreciation of the huge responsibility shouldered by teachers in Egypt, Watani decided to hear a number of them speak on what it is to be a teacher.

Teachers in Egypt generally face myriad challenges; to list but a few: parental interference or lack thereof; low salaries, difficult teaching conditions; students’ use or misuse of mobile phones and the Internet at school; and an occasional altogether mutinous attitude by students and parents.

“Poverty and ignorance impede the education process,” says Isaac Naguib, English teacher at a public school. “When parents are poor and uneducated, they lack the attitude and resources needed to help their child benefit from the education process,” he says.

Throughout his 32-year career in teaching, Mr Naguib has been keen on not being a mere teacher but a friend and guide to his students.

“We are messengers. We carry a message to the students. It is a responsibility we will answer to before God,” he says.

Lydia Bedrous, 30, secondary school teacher, cares to gain the trust of her students with a personal, wise approach. “Students have trust and competition issues among themselves. In most cases they have difficulty communicating with their parents and often feel misunderstood and unappreciated. This means they need to find in their teacher a good, trustworthy friend.

“There is mutual trust between my students and myself; they confide in me, up to a limit of course,” she says.

School teachers play a powerful role in the lives of students not only in delivering information in class but in being role models. Their words, personalities, and life experiences are absorbed by their students. Knowingly or unknowingly, they are the window into the world of adulthood to these students.

While she had not intended to be a teacher, Nelly Nabih managed not only to gain the trust of her students but to be an inspiration for a number of them to go into teaching.

“So many of the girls I taught are now English teachers themselves,” says Ms Nabih, Head of English Department and General Manager Deputy of a private school in Cairo. She says her own teachers had been an inspiration to her by their methods of intertwining personal interaction with teaching.

“If you as a teacher are not wholly in class with your entire being, interacting with the students, giving them all you know, reaching out to them on a human level, and being altogether accessible, then teaching is reduced to a mere job,” Ms Nabih says.

Along the same line, Arabic language teacher Ola Karim says that students should be taught as the human beings they are, not as mere recipients of information. “Twenty-two students: I follow their eyes and gestures. I move around, give them a light pat on the head, and change the tone of my voice to keep them engaged.”

At some point, teaching feels like a thankless undertaking. There is no glamour or accolades for a teacher at the end of a year of toiling in class with many raucous, rowdy students. But, just as picking the ripened fruit of a tree planted a long time ago comes with a thrill, a teacher’s biggest joy is when former students express appreciation of the role the teacher played in their lives and the indelible mark left; and carry the legacy on to their children.

Pamela Badra, French language teacher at a Cairo private school, was thrilled when a former student told her how her advice had changed his life. “One male student told me he still remembered how I told him he should be strong and bear responsibility like a man. He said the words impacted him when his father died, and he had to bear the responsibility of the family business,” she says.

For teachers around the world, the last school year was tough. “I wasn’t happy when school closed and the classes were empty. I missed the hustle and bustle of the students and their curious questions,” Mr Naguib says. But another school year is starting, and he goes back to his class and students with renewed passion for his life mission of teaching.