The profession of a Teacher

There are professions - vocations - & people surrender themselves wholly to these professions. Undoubtedly, the profession of a teacher is one of them.

Even if you want to be a teacher you can’t become a good one. You must be born one. Love for children, an ability to communicate with them, understand &teach them – these are the most important qualities of a genuine teacher. An ability to be a genuine teacher is God’s gift; it’s like the talent of a writer, an artist or a musician, it’s even more – it’s fate. A teacher is like a sculptor: he moulds a personality out of a child like a sculptor creates a beautiful statue out of clay.

Pedagogy is a very complex & responsible study; probably no less responsible than medicine. As a patient hands to the doctor the most expensive thing – his life, so parents entrust the teacher with the most valuable creature – their child. And mainly it depends on a teacher what kind of person a child will grow up to be: a genius or villain.

If you want to be a teacher it is not a problem nowadays. In Russia there are more than 250 teachers training colleges & universities; six of them are in Moscow. Every year thousands of young people graduate from these colleges to come to school on the 1^st of September.

According to a survey, more than 70 per cent of students enter these colleges by their own choice, & it is well known to them what difficult & sometimes ungrateful work is waiting for them after receiving their diplomas. In the process of education when they were asked whether they were sorry about their choice of profession, 60 per cent said that they were not sorry at all. Judging by these facts. I can say that teachers come to school not for money (the salary of a teacher is laughable), but they simply can’t help coming because it’s their vocation to work with children.

The profession of a teacher combines both joy & sorrow.

A person who gets pedagogical training should master a lot of knowledge. But the main thing he should understand is according to what laws & rules the personality of a child develops. The most important of them are love & mercy. Doctors have a rule: “Do not do harm”. Teachers must also follow this rule: because there is nothing more valuable than children & it depends on teachers what kind of people the children will become. A teacher is responsible for all pupils, for, according to Antoine de Saint Exupery we are answerable for those whom we have tamed.

Teachers & Actors

I. Give Russian equivalents of the following words:

Control, explanation, feeling, gift, invent, gift, quality, stage, audience.

II. Make up three forms of the following verbs:

a) Hear, hold, keep, sit, stand.

b) Act, express, fix, invent, obey, repeat, seem, suit, talk, walk, watch.

III. Remember the following expressions & make up your own sentences using them.

The attention of the audience – внимание аудитории

To be a clear speaker – обладать хорошей дикцией

A pleasing voice – приятный голос

Important differences – важные различия

To learn by heart – заучивать наизусть

To take part in – принимать участие в

To obey orders – выполнять указания

Exactly the same words – точно те же самые слова

IV. Read & translate the text.

To be a good teacher, you need some of the gifts of the good actor: you must be able to hold the attention & interest of your audience; you must be a clear speaker, with good, strong, pleasing voice which is fully under your control; & you must be able to act what you are teaching in order to make its meaning clear.

Watch a good teacher, & you will see that he does not sit motionless before his class: he stands the whole time he is teaching, he walks about, using his arms, hands & fingers to help him in his explanations, & his face to express feelings. Listen to him, & you will hear the loudness, the quality & the musical note of his voice always changing according to what he is talking about. The fact that a good teacher has some of the gifts of a good actor does not mean that he will indeed be able to act well on the stage: for there are very important differences between the teacher’s work & the actor’s. The actor has to speak words which he has learned by heart; he has to repeat exactly the same words each time he plays a certain part; even his movements & the way in which he uses his voice are usually fixed before. What he has to do is to make all these carefully learned words & actions seem natural on the stage.

A good teacher works in quite a different way. His audience takes an active part in his play; they ask & answer questions, they obey orders, & if they do not understand something, they say so. The teacher therefore has to suit his act to the needs of his audience, which is his class. He can not learn his part by heart, but must invent is as he goes along.

I know many teachers who were fine actors in class but were unable to take part in a stage-play because their brains would not keep strictly to what another had written. (Англ. яз. для гуманитарных факультетов. М.: – 1997)

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