Balanced Teaching

To teach is to touch the heart and impel it to action.
Louis Sullivan

The profession of a teacher is very hard and exhausting. It is hard not only physically but morally as well, because children, who are very sincere, emotional and responsive, they demand the same in exchange. They sense the hypocrisy and the disrespect of tutors who try to behave deceitfully. A real teacher should give a piece of his heart to every student he has; so imagine the size of a true teacher’s heart! It should be the size of the universe. No courses that are being taught in teacher’s training colleges can suggest to the human what piece each child deserves. Only experience will give the answer to this question.

But what should a person do if he has no such experience? If he has just come to school and all he has is a mental equipment of Pedagogics, Methodics and pedagogical techniques? Of course, to gain experience. And the way he can gain experience is by practice – a kind of trial and error method. To be a young teacher is doubly hard. All the time a young teacher tries to find a balance between professionalism and a humane attitude towards his foster-children. This border is like a compass in the sea of teaching. If a border will be moved to one side, a tutor can be too liberal with the children, they won’t see a strong personality in this case and won’t listen to the teacher and will misbehave. The other extreme is not permitted either, because as a result, what we will see is not a human being but a computer for reading lectures and checking knowledge. Some teachers-theorists suppose that the filling of a border between these two notions is inherent and can’t be found, others think that it can be found with the help of reflection and careful preparation for each lesson. To my mind both points of view are partly right because we should have an innate feeling of empathy and reflex just on the basis of it. People who have no sense of empathy shouldn’t go in for teaching at all, especially teaching in schools and kindergartens.

School is a place where a person is educated, where we train moral and human qualities into the hearts of our pupils. It is not a place for the teachers that cannot understand the feelings and the emotional experience of their students, because the effect of the teacher’s intervention can be very low or we may even have not noticed it at all.

Some short-sighted people think that school is not economically profitable or useful for the country as it produces no goods; but they are wrong. It does, it “produces” real human beings and they are much more important than any other goods.