Never lose sight of the grandeur of your task. It’s very easy to get lost in all the lesson planning, test paper checking, PAASCU documentation work, Academic Week preparations, etc., that we might neglect our greatest calling as teachers: To be a “significant adult” in each of our students’ lives. Teachers who go beyond the delivery of their lessons and who make it their day-to-day mission to truly care for them. If we are to touch their lives, as the cliché goes, if we are to positively influence them, we have to insert in our way-too-busy schedules the effort to forge relationships with each of our students: Relationships of genuine warmth and concern, within and outside Woodrose, in the present time and in the years to come.
Let us be our students’ ordinary heroes not with extraordinary feats but with small yet powerful gestures. To be our students’ listening ear as they unload their worries and difficulties, to check on them when we notice they’re having a bad day, to greet them personally on their significant anniversaries, to pat them on the shoulder, telling them “They can do it” when academic work causes them a lot of stress and anxiety…the list goes on.
Great teachers do not limit themselves to teaching their subjects: They take their responsibility as “role models” and “second parents” seriously leaving students with unforgettable beautiful memories of integrity, genuine warmth, interest and care, solid and firm guidance that will have a profound effect on them for the rest of their lives.
Teachers, in the truest sense of the word, do not seek to shine nor seek their own glory, but are the “Polaris” who let their light shine to “lead the way,” to guide, to shepherd their students toward their integral growth. Real teachers’ luminous lives shine bright in the minds, hearts of their students.
Today is indeed a special day as we thank God for the existence and presence of teachers in our lives.
Truly one of life’s best blessings!
Happy Teachers’ Day!
Maria Gina R. Rama, Ed.D
Executive Director