Following the recent very bad phenomena of school culture, I remember two incidents that I witnessed related to the behavior between teachers and students in school and the authority of teachers.
The first incident happened in 2002, when I was an intern at the school. When it was time for my assigned class, I went to class but couldn’t get in. Because the students had locked the door, locking another teacher in the room.
The locked-up teacher was crying, while the students outside were shouting, expressing their joy at seeing the usually fierce and mean teacher submit, scared to tears. They said "let's teach her a lesson"!
The second incident happened in 2017, during my field trip to a school. While I was interviewing the principal, there was a commotion outside. The principal quickly asked to stop the conversation. The principal went outside, shouted loudly, called security, and dispersed the crowd. In reality, he was rescuing a teacher who was sitting in the school yard.
When he calmed down and returned to the interview, the principal told me: "Now I'll tell you the truth, from now until the end of his term, before he retires, I will try to get that teacher out of the teaching profession. It's so hard, Ms. Tho, this person is not a teacher... He doesn't teach well. Yet we tried to get him fired but couldn't. It's a pain for the whole school."
I will not comment on things that I do not have a clear understanding of. Now, taking advantage of this story, I would like to express my thoughts. There are people who are working in schools, standing on the podium, but do not have enough capacity and dignity to be teachers. When taking stock, they meet all the standards (in a formal way, but in reality, they have been and are being "despised"), so they do not have any dignity to be worthy of being a teacher.
There are always "undercurrents" that can become "tsunami" in schools, if...
At this point, I can mention the professional standards for teachers of general education institutions (regulated by Circular 20/2018/TT-BGDDT), the connotation of the teacher's authority that I am talking about can be expressed in: "Standard 1: professional qualities, love, respect, friendliness with students; maintaining ethics, prestige, and teacher conscience".
This standard has accompanying criteria. First, be a role model for students: healthy, civilized, standard lifestyle, scientific and serious working style, friendly behavior towards students.
Criterion 2 is about the moral qualities of teachers: firm political stance and ideology, dedication and responsibility for the profession, preserving the qualities, honor and reputation of teachers.
One thing that dedicated educators always ask is: how is that standard 1 trained, how is it expressed in practice in a school. In fact, if nothing happens, any teacher is considered to have "good qualities", having the authority of a teacher.
When working with schools on a topic of educational quality management and school safety, I discovered that hidden beneath the tranquility of seemingly stable educational activities, there are always "undercurrents" that, when analyzed, I feel, can create a "tsunami" at any time.
The reason comes from the fact that daily educational activities only pay attention to monitoring and managing "teaching on time and in class". Very few schools pay attention to "how to teach", "direct behavior" of each school member, and what the school culture is like.
When I observed some teacher evaluation activities, I realized that by asking the question: "If the quality of the teacher is not good, then are they bad people?", a "respectful" mentality appeared, and therefore some manifestations of not creating or maintaining prestige appeared, and the evaluation of teachers' qualities was taken lightly.
"Teachers are teachers, students are students" is always the root of education.
Going back to the two stories I told above, although they happened many years ago, I am sure that they are not rare now. It is very possible that in a school, there exists a person who stands on the podium, but does not have the qualities of a teacher!
The elders in the teaching profession, past and present research, in the East or the West, all say that "teachers are teachers, students are students" is the root of education. So I think that no matter where or whom they teach, teachers must have authority.
This prestige does not come naturally. This prestige requires a lot of training, training of mind, heart, and strength. It is not easy to evaluate this prestige.
I believe that this authority is always the root, and comes from self-training. When a violation is discovered, even if it is very small, the teaching staff must consider it serious and handle it thoroughly.
All students are unhappy if they meet a teacher without qualities. A school cannot be peaceful if it does not maintain school discipline, which is like home discipline!
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