Being a teacher doesn’t stop when we walk out of our classrooms or out of our schools. Teachers, perhaps more than any other profession, are always working. We meet our students on train platforms, at the supermarket, or simply walking down the street. Even when we are not meeting our students unexpectedly, we often think about them and our classes on our days off (when we have them). We view almost every experience as something we can potentially bring back with us to our classroom. So it is no surprise that being a teacher shapes and changes our families as well. In the last iTDi issue, we began to explore just what having a teacher as a daughter, a father, a sister, a partner, or a mother means to the people closest to us. At iTDi we were honoured to see this conversation move off our own blog and become part of the wider dialogue about context and challenges faced by teachers across the ELT world. We are grateful for the chance to read these family interview focused posts and to learn more about the rich lives of the teachers in our communities and the families that support them:
Sandy Millin, Technologically and linguistically adventurous EFL teacher ‘Why do I Let my daughter travel abroad for her job’
Anne Hendler, Livinglearning ‘Far, Far Away: An Interview’
Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto, Teaching Village ‘From This Teacher’s Daughter’
Kevin Stein, The Other Things Matter ‘From This Teacher’s Family’
We hope that other teachers will take the time to sit down and talk with their families to find out and share with us how being a teacher is about so much more than just working with students. We look forward to adding more posts to the above list. Because stories ‘From the Teacher’s Family’ are a gift for the teaching community. They are a gift of understanding and, at the same time, a celebration of the joys and challenges that make us all teachers.
