Professionals of education

I’ve been for many years in the education world whether as a student or as a professional and, believe me, I’ve met great professors whose disciplines you soon realize that they are their lives, and they know very well how to pass onto their students this passion of them turning subjects that could be considered boring into real adventures. I’m talking about professors like Mr. Keating, the protagonist of the film The Dead Poets Society. This is the motivating sort of professor, but we also have the strict type. Those who ask too much of their students and who usually practise what they preach. Sometimes this kind of professor can be so demanding as to the point of forgetting to take into account important aspects like the students’ interest for the subject, or the students’ effort and progress. As opposed to this they seem to be more concerned with the marks and sometimes they can make you pay for every last thousandth of your school report. As a whole they are good professors but as everything in life, virtue is not placed in the sides, but in the middle.

In the other side of this universe of professionals we find the bad teachers; a group of “professionals” that you do not get to understand very well how they got their degree or what they are actually doing in the education world because they tend to display a kind of student-phobia, and a great bias in the way they assess their students. Unluckily this is the sort of professors that seem to possess a special virtue to ruin your life and they have any eagerness that you show to learn taken away. Inside this group we find the ghost teachers who never turn up at their own class-time; preferring to place in front of the students their own personal interests. It seems that they do not give a damn about their students’ eagerness to learn or the fact that they have paid for the registration of the course to get this or that knowledge.

We also have the discouraging and at-all-times subjective sort of teachers who decide, right from the very first moment that you step into their class, whether you will be one of their beloved ones or not. If you are so lucky as to be in the group of their favourite students, you will not have to struggle in the whole course as you will always get the top marks. But, beware! because if you belong to the group of students considered by them as “persona non grata”, you needn’t make an effort either because neither the interest you show for the subject nor your constant study will be reflected in your grades. You will always be assessed with the minimal mark needed to pass the subject and you will even have to thank them for that! These two latter specimens of professors are the ones that manage to thwart the responsible students and make them hate the studies they had enrolled with such an illusion to the point of leading them into a sort of depression.

Something of the kind happened to me recently. Certainly, it is a difficult job to be a professor, specially in a hypocrital and interested world like the one we are living in. It is so easy for the professor to be tempted to take advantage of the position of power they have with regard to the students that there should be some kind of mechanism to prevent such abuses. At the end the students are risking their future with all of this!

PHOTO: Video capture from the movie The Dead Poets Society (1989)