{"id":5055,"date":"2011-03-14T17:35:40","date_gmt":"2011-03-14T13:35:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=5055"},"modified":"2011-03-14T17:38:08","modified_gmt":"2011-03-14T13:38:08","slug":"the-two-words-every-inspirational-teacher-deserves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/middle-east-society\/the-two-words-every-inspirational-teacher-deserves\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Words Every Inspirational Teacher Deserves"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201cSuccess has many fathers, failure\u2019s an orphan\u201d.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 For it was he who dribbled past two opponents before whipping in the perfect cross to meet the striker\u2019s head barely six inches from the goal-line.<\/p>\n

The CEO receiving his well-deserved multi-million dollar bonus could maybe throw an arm around (or perhaps exchange a \u2018high-five\u2019) with the less flamboyant CFO who spent many sleepless nights playing with spreadsheets to ensure the hearty round of applause at the shareholders meeting.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Ho hum, \u2018such is life\u2019 or \u2018c\u2019est la vie\u2019 is the shrugged response.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, though, the shrugged response is simply not good enough.\u00a0 There is one group of individuals on the planet who are deserving of so much more than a shrugged response.<\/p>\n

They are teachers.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0 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 \u2018Germans made the best maps\u2019. \u00a0 Morris Gleitzman, a highly successful Australian children\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Greg Mortenson\u00a0 (author of the international best-seller \u2018Stones to Schools\u2019) 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.\u00a0 At the end of his riveting session Mortenson, along with his Afghani team, deservedly received a standing ovation.<\/p>\n

Applause is not, unfortunately, a sound with which most teachers are familiar.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It was only when he became \u2018Pulitzer Prize Winning Frank McCourt\u2019 that the world sat up and took notice.\u00a0 But it was his work as a teacher, not as an international, best-selling and prize winning author, of which he was most proud.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m 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.\u00a0 But they managed to connect with the little voice inside you, the voice that says \u2018this is important to me\u2019.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s time, I think, that the voice spoke.\u00a0 If you have let your inspirational teacher know what they\u2019ve done for you then bravo, take a bow.\u00a0 If, however, like me you haven\u2019t then it\u2019s time to swing into action. I\u2019ve decided to declare the next week \u2018Thank Your Inspirational Teacher\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

I hesitate to call for a chain letter on this but hesitate only briefly \u2013 encourage your friends, family and neighbours to do the same.\u00a0 You\u2019ve spent longer tracking down the school bully on Friends Reunited.\u00a0 Go on, do something a bit more constructive with half an hour this week.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

JAMES MULLAN: A theme evolved during the sessions at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, the debt every creative person owes inspirational teachers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":5056,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[154,92,5],"tags":[24,1922,18296,2237,18291,5380],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5055"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5055"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5055\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}