Today (May 15th) is the Day of the Educator in Mexico (Dia del Maestro). Technically, I’m not a “teacher” (I teach university and post-graduate) and thus I am a professor, but I celebrate (and I am celebrated) just the same.
While I don’t have the same teaching load I used to have at The University of British Columbia’s Department of Political Science (2-1-2), I still teach and I enjoy it enormously.
I searched through my Teaching Portfolio for my teaching philosophy to see whether anything had changed.
As a teacher, my philosophy is that learning should be constructive, challenging, fun and exciting. Constructive in that my role is to help the student feel confident about his/her skills for the future. Challenging, insofar it should present difficulties that both the student and I will have to work together to overcome. Fun, in that it should provide joy for the student and me as the teacher. And exciting in that learning should be an activity to which both student and teacher should be looking forward. The feedback I have received from students is that I am able to provide all of these in a comfortable learning environment.
I think very little has changed, even though now I’m on my second year teaching Mexican students instead of Canadian and international students. I still want my students to succeed, to get jobs, to gain employable skills.
I teach not because I HAVE to, but because I LOVE to. There are very few things that make me happier than seeing a student succeed. I think the Twitter ID Sh!t Academics Say summarized it best in two tweets:
On what teaching is…
Academic instruction: Giving students what they need, disguised as what they want.
— Shit Academics Say (@AcademicsSay) May 11, 2014
On student success…
There are few things more rewarding as an academic than seeing your students succeed.
— Shit Academics Say (@AcademicsSay) May 2, 2014
Happy Educator’s Day! Feliz Dia del Maestro, colegas!
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