Two Words Every Inspirational Teacher Deserves

“Success has many fathers, failure’s an orphan”.  The striker who scores a goal then wheels round, kisses the club badge and kneels before the adoring fans should remember to acknowledge the hard-working winger.  For it was he who dribbled past two opponents before whipping in the perfect cross to meet the striker’s head barely six inches from the goal-line.

The CEO receiving his well-deserved multi-million dollar bonus could maybe throw an arm around (or perhaps exchange a ‘high-five’) with the less flamboyant CFO who spent many sleepless nights playing with spreadsheets to ensure the hearty round of applause at the shareholders meeting.

More often than not, however, the striker will wait for the winger to come and acknowledge his prowess at delivering from less than a foot and the CEO will milk the applause without so much as a sideways glance at the CFO.  Ho hum, ‘such is life’ or ‘c’est la vie’ is the shrugged response.

Sometimes, though, the shrugged response is simply not good enough.  There is one group of individuals on the planet who are deserving of so much more than a shrugged response.

They are teachers.

The debt that all of us owe teachers became apparent to me as I attended several sessions of the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature last week.   Michael Palin, the ex-Monty Python, globe-trotting adventurer said he was inspired to travel by an eccentric geography teacher who insisted on instructing his students via maps which were exclusively in the Germany language because ‘Germans made the best maps’.   Morris Gleitzman, a highly successful Australian children’s author spoke of an English teacher who ignored the syllabus and taught his ten year old charges by simply relating to them a story he invented and recounted through the school year.

Greg Mortenson  (author of the international best-seller ‘Stones to Schools’) who has devoted his life to establishing schools in Afghanistan spoke movingly of the enormous impact that the programme he has helped establish has had in changing the lives of young Afghani women.  At the end of his riveting session Mortenson, along with his Afghani team, deservedly received a standing ovation.

Applause is not, unfortunately, a sound with which most teachers are familiar.  The late Frank McCourt, who appeared at the same festival two years ago said that forty years of teaching in a tough Brooklyn school gained him not a fraction of the recognition that resulted from a year spent writing a book.  It was only when he became ‘Pulitzer Prize Winning Frank McCourt’ that the world sat up and took notice.  But it was his work as a teacher, not as an international, best-selling and prize winning author, of which he was most proud.

I’m sure all of us can think of at least one individual in our past who has inspired us in some way. They may have had to deal with indifference, hostility, sarcasm or worse in the classroom and you may have seen the toll that working in this environment exerted on them.  But they managed to connect with the little voice inside you, the voice that says ‘this is important to me’.  It may be that like Palin and Gleitzman you followed that voice, maybe in your professional career, maybe in your spare time but you know that it was a significant moment.

So it’s time, I think, that the voice spoke.  If you have let your inspirational teacher know what they’ve done for you then bravo, take a bow.  If, however, like me you haven’t then it’s time to swing into action. I’ve decided to declare the next week ‘Thank Your Inspirational Teacher’ week. Seven days should be enough time to track down the individual (or in my case two individuals) who made a difference to you and simply drop them a line letting them know that you recognize their effort and thanking them for it.

I hesitate to call for a chain letter on this but hesitate only briefly – encourage your friends, family and neighbours to do the same.  You’ve spent longer tracking down the school bully on Friends Reunited.  Go on, do something a bit more constructive with half an hour this week.

by James Mullan

James, the co-founder of MidEastPosts, is a former Director of a leading global public relations firm in the Middle East, and a Managing Partner of Insight, a successful media training business that works with clients at a senior level throughout the region.

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