Why I am glad people think teaching is easy by @teacherswords1

We have all heard it. At some point in our career someone has told us that teaching is easy. They may have made a reference to our long summer holidays or the time school finishes during the week. But unlike most teachers I am always pleased when people tell me teaching is easy and this is why.

It means teachers are doing their job correctly

This is a re-blog post originally posted by Will Ansell and published with kind permission.

The original post can be found here.

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Our job as teachers is with one task in mind: To promote learning from our students. To do this we must address a never ending list of problems such as teaching styles, pedagogy and assessment. All of the things we do behind the scenes is what makes us fantastic teachers and takes up a lot of our time. Despite all the strains and pressures on us we always make sure our students only see what we want them to see. Students don’t care about what research you did or how late you stayed up planning the lesson. Even if they did it is not going to help their learning in any way. We plan our lessons to ensure that the content is kept simple and concise. Students learn much better when information is given to them in a simple to understand manner.

Unless you have been in teaching you will only have experienced this ‘show’. Just like in the theatre we don’t know about all the hours spent rehearsing over and over again. We only see the final product. Just like with our teaching, students are only experiencing the tip of the iceberg. To facilitate learning as well as possible we must portray our topics as simply as possible. We try to make it look easy to give the students the confidence to have a go at it and succeed. When these students grow up they are left with an impression that teaching seems like a simple job. If people think that teaching is easy because I am making it look easy then I know I am doing my job well.