Teachers’ Day 2024: A letter from a teacher to future educators

Dear future teachers,
When I was starting my own journey as an educator, my mentor told me something that has stayed with me and guided me on my most hopeless days: teaching is the greatest act of optimism. I think teacher’s day is a great time to remind myself and, more importantly all of you, who are about to start your own exciting journey of shaping the future of the world, about this simple and self-evident but often-ignored truth!
I want you to take a moment to unpack this line instead of dismissing it as a Hallmark greeting card-type missive that makes you smile for a second, but doesn’t really mean anything.
I believe that optimism requires a sense of excitement for all the weird and wonderful things that are changing in the world all around us… And I honestly can’t think of a better explanation for your new role in the world. And the reason I’m bringing this up today is because very soon, you’ll find yourself almost deafened by noise that will make you question whether teaching is an act of optimism… Or fear.
Because fear grabs eyeballs and is addictive.
It’s easier to get students and parents to pay attention by terrifying them about the uncertainty of the future than to inspire them to look forward to it and approach it with positivity. That’s the sad truth and difficult choice you’re going to have to contend with. I can also tell you that there’s nothing more rewarding when you achieve the latter. But that also requires work. You can’t make students comfortable with uncertainty unless you get comfortable with it yourself – which starts with the acceptance that the role of the teacher in today’s day and age is not the same as it used to be.
Gone are the times when vocations and professions evolved over generations. Now the world can change in a matter of months. How do you prepare children for a future that none of us can predict with any degree of accuracy? Oddly enough, we have to go back to the basics and the past to get ready for the future. Which means helping children deeply learn the foundations of the disciplines of the future, so they become endlessly curious about everything that gets built on those foundations.
We can’t prepare for what the future might look like, but we can equip them with deep knowledge of the forces that will shape the future. What this means is that while we don’t know what exact tech they will be using 5, 10, 20 years from now, we do know that tech will be the driving force of the future. We don’t know how much the boundaries of AI will expand over the coming years, but we know that AI will be a force to reckon with. We don’t know what shape national and global financial institutions will take or how the world will do entrepreneurship, but we know that money, commerce, and business will never not be important.
It’s easy to train kids to give smart prompts on generative AI tools, but it is a lot harder to help them understand how that technology came to be, what its current contours are, and what its future potential might be. The first requires superficial knowledge and rote learning, while the second needs deep engagement with the subject first by the teacher, so that curiosity can extend to the student.
I’m not going to pretend that it’s easy. When you’re teaching evolving and future-looking subjects to kids, your own learning and upskilling can never stop. Add to that the cacophony of fear from the world all around you. It is natural for parents to worry about things they can’t predict or control in their children’s world. Which means that teaching a child a new-age skill to make them future-ready is to also take their parents along on this journey of “It’s really going to be okay” and “No, it is NOT better to quickly teach them 20 prompts or common use cases in 2 classes, it’s better to teach them the actual technology in 20!”
Sometimes you’ll have to take this journey with each child and parent multiple times before they start believing in it, and start seeing the world differently. And I will admit that this can be exhausting and overwhelming at times. But it’s so, so worth it the day all the hard work comes to fruition and your student charges far ahead because their knowledge of a subject comes from a space of understanding charged with curiosity, critical thinking, and culminates in experimentation. It’s so, so worth it when you realise that you’ve changed the way your students not only learn with you, but how they look at the world, fundamentally!
5 years ago if you’d asked me what my biggest upskilling achievement was, I’d say it was the transition from mostly physical learning tools to the plethora of online tools that are now available to educators. I’m amazed by how many times my answer would have changed if you’d asked me the same question over the last 18 months. I’ve spent hundreds of hours using the AI-enabled platform that personalises and individualises learning for kids.
Which means I’ve spent dozens of back-breaking hours learning it first. We now have the ability to teach every child every subject by factoring in the context, pace, and format of learning that they are most interested in. For example: If a student wants to design a travel app but also has a love for history, the platform can intuitively combine these two interests and build simulations, tests, practise exercises and revision material combining these two things so the student’s learning journey can be that much more rewarding and personal.
But first, I have to put in the work to myself learn how such powerful technology came to be and what goes into creating it, even what ethical questions AI like that might raise for humanity as a whole.
If you’d asked me the same upskilling question 8 months ago, I’d say that the single most important thing I’ve learned recently is the ability to discern data. The tools we use are constantly giving us millions of data points about what our students need – where they are excelling, what they need support with, even what biases they might be developing. Asking the right questions to data and understanding the answers I get has been my Learning Everest as a teacher this past year.
Dear future teachers, teaching new-age skills is not for the faint of heart, but it is definitely for the strong of mind!
(Author of the letter Dhanjit Sarma is Senior Coding Educator, BrightCHAMPS. Views expressed are personal.)