Definition Essay: What Does It Means To Be A Teacher

It was always an unnecessarily horrifying moment when I accidentally called my teacher “mom”. The teacher would laugh, and my classmates would laugh, so naturally my face turned a scarlet shade of red in response. It is a common mistake among young students to refer to their teachers as “mom”, and I have even received this accidental honor as a tutor. At its core, I feel like this subconscious mistake says a lot about how students naturally feel about their favorite teachers. However, how does this speak to the meaning of a teacher and the role they play for our students? What qualities about an educator make a student accidentally refer to them as “mom”?
Being a teacher means sacrifice. My mom has spent countless hours of her own time working in her classroom, grading papers, and preparing lesson plans; in the summertime, she is constantly going to the school to organize her classroom and getting material together for the school year. This is unpaid and underappreciated work, and it is the story of teachers across America. Being a teacher means patience with one’s students, co-workers, and oneself. It sounds silly, but it can …show more content…
A passion for learning is vital to becoming a great teacher, and a really talented one can rub off some of this enthusiasm on even the most unengaged student in the classroom. Great teachers awaken something inside of their students, a thirst for knowledge and a responsibility to use it for a greater purpose, not just for the memorization of facts and the satisfaction of a perfect score. Teachers take classrooms of young people and mold them into future medical professionals, lawyers, engineers, military officers, law enforcement agents, entrepreneurs, and possibly even teachers. Most importantly, however, they create outstanding contributors to society as a whole, people who have a common ground of ideas about professionalism, manners, respect, and doing the right thing, no matter who is