Skip to main content

ARE YOU A CLASS TEACHER OR A GLOBAL TEACHER?

 At this point I can say that I have been in the education space for more than four years now and it seems the first two years were totally different from the last couple of years and to be honest, I owe it to being intentional.

Initially, when I started, I would just do my best in class, research my topics, write my plans, and try to show up to school early. I can acknowledge that I did fun and creative things in my classroom but I was content with just serving my class and being fulfilled that I was able to do my job to the best of my ability. Did I make impact? Yes I did, I was able to influence my classroom and others within my physical sphere of influence and I learned the art of self-leadership and self-motivation.

Sukanmi in his new School Uniform 
Fast forward to the later two years, I become more conscious about what I wanted to achieve with the space I was in, I wanted every second to count and I was ready to put in the work. So apart from all the work I was doing in class, I took my time to dust off all my social media handles and began documenting my experiences and telling my story, the advantage of this was the fact that within a few months, I got people from all over the world, commenting on and supporting the work I was doing with my learners, I am able to influence other educators all over the world by sharing strategies I use in my classroom. I have raised donations in cash and kind by just putting myself and my work out there. Was it easy? No, in fact, it's almost twice as hard as doing your regular class teacher job because storytelling is a lot of work, but I am reaping the rewards of taking the extra step to be a global teacher instead of just a class teacher.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

HOW MY FATHER TAUGHT ME TO BE AN EDUCATOR

  HOW MY FATHER TAUGHT ME TO BE AN EDUCATOR Looking at my life right now, I cannot help but be reminded of my dad. Nnana was what we called him. He was a very quiet man, keeps to himself, didn’t have friends, at least none that we knew of. Right now I remember him telling us stories of how his journey started, at that point my siblings and I were not really interested in those stories seeing how we roll our eyes when he starts giving us one of the stories, we always got one of those anytime we did something wrong-that was one of his punishment strategies. I really don’t know if it’s me who is missing him or there’s just   a lot of things to learn from the life of my dad as it connects to my job as an educator. My father was never really predictable, except of course with his stories. We were not sure what he would do next and was never a fan of always using the cane. My mom was the typical Nigerian mom, everything was a weapon to massively destroy your bad behavior-the c...

Teaching 9-10 Subjects per day: A blessing or a Curse.

The moment I started teaching my first lessons in my placement school, I knew from that moment that I was only going to be racing against time and the structures put in place to facilitate normal academic activities. Personally, I liked to access the situation of things with my learners before I go ahead to figure out what the best approach for a particular topic would be and since I was sure that most of my learners in primary 4 should be sent back to primary 1 I knew that there was a lot of work cut out for me. Before I start my class I try to research a topic online, I go on YouTube and try to find out very simple ways of teaching division to little kids. With this my kids are always surprised how simple Maths can be when I'm the one who is teaching it because the methods I use are at the level they understand and can relate to, this makes my learners feel like this school thing is not as hard as they thought. But the other side to it is the fact that my methods will usually tak...

PRIMARY SCHOOL TEACHERS TEACHING MULTIPLE SUBJECTS. YEH/NEH

If you are a primary school teacher and you teach more than one subject raise your hand.  Do you have subjects you know you have to do more research on before you feel confident teaching them? Do you sometimes feel the need to recheck and double-check things in one or more subjects compared to others? Are there subjects you have outright joy and confidence teaching compared to others? Are there times you wish you just stick to some of these subjects instead of having to pack up everything? To be honest, I understand that most school facilities cannot afford to pay individual teachers to handle each subject, I understand that they expect primary school teachers to know and understand the basic subjects well enough to teach them at preliminary levels, BUT! Are we experimenting with the next generation of Nigerians or are we giving them the best that there is? Our pupils deserve to have the best from every teacher and a teacher can only be his best self if he is teaching what he feels...