“All the lives a teacher touches”

With the end of the teaching season, one gets to do a closure of the lessons and also reflect a lot on how this term has gone and what, as a teacher, have gained from your students.

Yesterday, after the last piano lessons I taught this season and piano concerts we did for the parents with some private students, I received a very nice message from a family that I just read now again and made me reflect.

The message thanks me for “cultivating a love for music to their child”… I found it is such a beautiful message and it made me think, yesterday, that I hope that, as a teacher, I do this for the students; cultivate/initiate love in music and dance (and in anything I teach in general) to the little ones and also to adults, the same way they have been my passions and so important to me. This should be our goal as teachers: communicate/transmit the passion to the students.

Here is when also another reflection comes: how important and what a responsibility it is, as an educator , to teach kids and the youngest ones especially, when many times it is their first time doing an activity, like learning to play an instrument or dancing… and what a responsibility that is… depending on the teacher, one can ruin the child’s passion or motivation to do certain activity… and maybe they won’t want to continue playing that instrument or learning music, for example, in the future…

This also made me think of the sentence I wrote in the title: “all the lives a teacher touches”.

Linked to the previous thought, educators, because of working with other human beings, have a huge responsibility, as I said, and also can touch many others’ lives. If I think what teachers have actually “touched” or been an influence in my life, I can think of some of them and even how they actually really contributed and have been determinant in the choosing of my own path… I guess and hope it is the same for the ones that you are now reading this reflection.

I leave you now with a little task: try to think what teachers have been determinant in your life and how, maybe, your life has changed or taken a certain turn because of them.

How many lives a teacher touches?

Love,

Aixa