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Teachers are getting less influential than before, which is a fallacy...
--My understanding of what is a teacher
Anyone who does not hold a clear understanding of what roles teachers play may easily jump into the conclusion that teachers nowadays are getting less influential to their students. Ridiculous as it may seem, it is still quite easy to understand the reason why they would think so, because, admittedly, teachers do suffer from their great pressures in daily work. The immense advance of modern technology, despite its benefits to human being, sometimes imposes great changes of how people learn and study. One of the best examples is the Internet, a typical product of modern technology, from which students can get access to free study resources, by simply clicking and tapping. Since people seem to have discovered a whole new learning method, through which they can take classes without even stepping out of their bedroom, they would naturally accept that the importance and necessity of teachers are gradually fading out.
However, the truth is quite the opposite, because teachers would provide students with a completely different experience from what they can feel from the Internet. It is the face-to-face communication that makes all the difference. In a classroom, students can not only exchange their ideas with teachers effortlessly, but they can also feel the psychic power of teachers, which strengthens both the academic progress and the will of life. One lesson of my college English teacher left me a life-long impression. What makes all about him so extraordinary is the way how he explains English words. Unlike most teachers, he would always like to introduce the cultural background of each word. “Each word has its story”, as he said, ”and only when you know the history of these words can you eventually discover their true meanings and even their beauty”. Besides, he would also reveal the life philosophy related to some meanings of words, which greatly changed some of my views upon this world.
So, as teachers, what roles of teachers should we play among students? Personally, the job of teachers can not be simply confined to teaching students what skills to adopt and what knowledge to acquire. Instead, The question lies in how. Teachers are supposed to teach students how to explore the world around them and how to judge things by themselves. By doing so, students then can learn to select valuable information as well as filter out redundant information in such an information explosion age. The job of teachers is more than teaching alone; teachers also should serve as a guide showing directions of students’ life, whenever they feel interested in what they learn or have difficulties to make any improvements. All of these things make teachers inevitably influential to students’ growth, regardless of how rapid the technology develops, because these would always be the most wanted and necessary elements that students require in their learning process.
If we dare to see into the future, when technology drastically propels and even changes how teachers educate and how students learn, teachers would become a more influential role in daily schooling. That’s because what students can gain from the Internet is knowledge, but what they can gain from teachers is the guiding direction of their life. Then what might be the pressures teachers that might be encountered with? Obviously, only when teachers have a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities as well as a constant determination to flagellate themselves to become more profound and sensible can they eventually reach the top of the “education pyramid”.
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