Artikel ini saya post kembali karena saya tercengang oleh perkataan seorang perempuan berumur 33 tahun yang mengatakan bahwa pekerjaan guru itu pekerjaan orang miskin, dan bahwa dia tidak akan menikahi seorang laki - laki yang berprofesi sebagai seorang guru. Sebagai seorang traveller by office duty, pemikiran dia ternyata sangat picik bak katak dalam tempurung. Usut punya usut, tenyata salah satu ortunya adalah seorang guru. Jadi entah apa yang pernah dialaminya waktu kecil, sampai dia bisa punya opini sepicik itu. Your words, your mind, your attitude, your quality. Saya cukup tersenyum saja. Yuk, dibaca..
Teaching is an important profession and is increasingly popular career choice nowadays. Despite of the controversial issues about the existence of many international schools, the emergence of this kind of schools
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in Indonesia have attracted people’s attention to our education field. In the past, what we have in mind when we talked about teaching, it was an unpopular profession with a low salary. But I can say nowadays, teaching is a profession that may give you a good prosperity as will be described in this article. This article is dedicated for the young people who want to choose teaching as their career and also for those people who love teaching.
The first issue when a person wants to apply for a job is always about salary. If you are qualified enough to be a good teacher, you don’t need to worry about the salary. Most national plus schools will pay you more than enough. The payment will be much better if you have a chance to join international schools. If you have a good working manner and leadership, you will have a chance to get a higher position or build your own school. Who knows?
Put aside the salary issue. Actually, there are many advantages that you can get by choosing this profession. First, you will have more holidays as we know that there will be term breaks, semester breaks, Saturday off and many more. Second, you will be able to find many opportunities to meet new people. It could be parents, colleagues, ex - students and many more. You can start to build a good net work which means that you will have a chance to get new experiences. Perhaps you will enter a business someday after your retirement and those people are your assets. They may give you some contribution in it. Third, teaching career will give you a never ending lesson. You will experience a challenging environment with new cases to be solved every day. Teaching a subject means that you will learn a subject too. Fourth, teaching keeps you young because you can make up silly jokes or share jokes with your students or colleagues. I have been teaching for more than ten years in various levels and I really enjoy my job because sometimes I can get many laughter from my students when I teach. Fifth, the dynamic environment and the problems will enrich, up – date and up – grade your knowledge about teaching, including your soft skills in handling parents and students. Good teachers know that by listening to and working with colleagues, parents, other professionals and community members, they can inspire students and improve their learning.
Teaching is a special calling and it’s not a job suited for everyone. A good teacher should be psychologically mature enough and is able to be a good role model for the students. Well, everybody’s flawless, especially when we have to deal with our personal problems. A good teacher should have a good control of her/himself in this area so at least he/she will be a perfect role model in front of her/his students. A good teacher should be able to answer all questions given by the students and master the lesson very well. Many teachers quit after three or four years teaching because they don't master the lesson very well so that they find difficulties when they need to deliver the materials. If you are a person who has a skill in public speaking but too lazy to browse and update new information related to the lesson or join seminars, you have to stop dreaming to work in this field.
A good teacher also should be competent and creative since he/she needs to make a lesson plan. In a classroom, there will be students with different ability and capability. Just like a psychologist, a teacher should be able to read the situation so that it will be easier for the teacher to deliver a topic based on the students’ need. Teaching needs preparation. It’s not only about the materials needed but also about how to deliver a topic effectively. That’s why a good teacher should be familiar with the curriculum used by the school. After that, you can improvise by having your own method to deliver a topic. I am teaching English and Social Studies in one of national plus school in Jakarta. So far, my students enjoy my lessons so much because I use a progressive method which triggers their curiosity about a topic. We have some discussions and many activities that involve them in it. By having discussion times, a teacher will teach the students to brainstorm about a solution from a problem given independently. So teachers, please be patient. Don’t give the answer too soon before they have tried their best to find the solution. You may give them reward and display their projects along the corridor so that the other students from the lower grade will also learn something. It also will give them a challenge to make a better project the next school year.
It will be a benefit if a teacher practices the subject that he/she teaches outside the school. If you teach creative writing, it will be good if you work as a writer or an editor too. If you are a music teacher, it will be a plus score if you work as a composer or singer too. You can connect the theory with the real practice and make a good lesson plan which I believe will be so enjoyable. Imagine if you teach English and at the same time you work in a publishing company. You can take your students to have a field trip there and make a report about it. You will also have enough resources to use for your writing class. The point to be noted here is that when a teacher has another job outside the school, she/he should be able to manage the time more wisely.
Teaching is dealing with human and there are many characters of human in the world. So, you have to be able to understand them individually and give the suitable treatment for them. A good teacher is also a good manager. He/she should be able to manage her/his time and has a good leadership to manage humans in the classroom. You have to be able to show your dignity in front of your students. If you can’t ask them to follow your direction well, you will find difficulties in delivering the lesson. It means that you have failed in managing and controlling your class. A good teacher should have an ability to read a situation, be attractive enough to catch student’s attention and maintain it so that the class will stick to the lesson plan that he/she has made before. Sometimes students like to ‘try’ us or bully us. They want to see our limits. Your response to everything happens in class will give a big influence to the students' decision whether they will respect you or the other way around. Dealing with the naughty one is not difficult actually. Give them more responsibility and involve them more in school activity. Students nowadays are smart, so you have to be smarter than them. You have to be consistent in maintaining the discipline, especially in giving reward and punishment. Every student has the same rights to be treated equally in getting the reward and punishment.
A good teacher should also have a good skill in diplomacy. Sometimes, we have to face a very demanding parents or a parent who’s angry to teacher without asking for any explanation first. We have to face the fact that there’s a stereotype in our education field nowadays that a student is a customer. Parents have paid a very expensive school fee, so they demand a perfect service. If you have a good diplomatic skill, you still can be ‘save’ although you have a mistake. In this case, we have to act like a customer service who tries to service his/her clients calmly. The way you negotiate will lead you to a result whether you succeed or not in handling parents.
Teaching is not as simple and easy nowadays comparing to the old days, especially if you want to teach in national or international school which has a very different style and environment with the government school. One for sure, you will never be happy and comfortable in doing the job if you feel that you don’t get enough appreciation yet. Salary is just one of the appreciation/reward's form. People usually will be motivated to do something if they know what advantages that they can get by doing that, including the financial factor. So, you may start to make a decision whether you want to make teaching as your career or not after reading this article. Remember, money won't always make you happy.
So, no worries, being a teacher will not make you poor, instead you will be RICH.
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