See you later, educator: we need a word that properly values teachers
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As a student teacher back in the ’80s, I asked my class to compose a clerihew. This four-line poem encapsulates a person’s life, where the opening line is the subject’s name, followed by a comic summary of their existence. With an AABB rhyme, they read like this: “Alan Turing/ Must have been alluring/ To get made a don/ So early on.”
Metre doesn’t matter. It’s all about the flair. “Write a clerihew about your life so far,” I dared my Year 8 guinea pigs. Before the bell, one girl managed: “Lindy E/ Playwright-to-be/ She buys her pens/ In packets of tens.”
Confidante and counsellor: Quinta Brunson as the lovable second-grade teacher Janine Teagues in Abbott Elementary.
In many ways, those four lines added up to the reason I loved teaching. Sure, a salary helped, assuming you matriculated, while a circle of peers in the staff room was a bonus, up there with Friday cake. Yet quiz any teacher and most will say they teach to see a student get it. To light up. To bloom.
Irish poet WB Yeats said, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” Unpeeling the word, education means to lead out, as though students bank on teachers to walk them forward into their potential. I owe a great debt to my own ushers of the past, mentors who stirred the compassionate learner behind my smart-arse veneer.
Not that a dictionary can encompass all that. Check the Macquarie, say, and there’s no talk of fire-lighting. No stirring or creativity. No glossary mentions skill-building or patience, the role of confidante or counsellor, plus a dozen other words Victorian teachers nominated when polled about what teachers do.
Meg Southcombe, a student teacher at Newcastle Uni, only added to the description in her viral TikTok in October. “Teachers are educating the future, the future that will probably look after your kids.” Meg’s video arose due to many around her saying she was “just doing teaching”, as if she’d picked a lesser calling.
To quote Nathan Van Der Monde, the principal of Warburton Primary: “The idea that a teacher stands in front of the class and reads from a textbook is not only outdated, it’s inaccurate, and could be preventing people from considering a career in teaching.”
Combine all these elements – in league with dwindling intakes, modest salaries, and burnout rates – and the Victorian Department of Education sensed a need to improve the language around teaching. That’s how Think HQ, a marketing agency, came to knock on several dictionaries’ doors, seeing if the neutral definition could be revamped.
Look up “teacher” in the Macquarie, say, and you’ll read of “someone who teaches or instructs, especially as a profession; instructor.” Consult the verb to learn that teach is “to impart knowledge of or skill in.” All very bland, plain, the cold nuts and bolts.
Compare that to the superlatives drawn from the Oxford Children’s Language Corpus, a dynamic body of writing from primary-age Australian and NZ students. There you’ll find the words most often aligned with teacher include “awesome”, “beloved”, “caring”, “cool”, “great”, “kind” and “wonderful”. Any chance a dictionary could reflect that vitality? That warmth? The life-fostering beyond the usual whiteboard stuff?
Alison Moore, the Macquarie’s chief editor, was polite but firm. Dictionaries don’t work that way. Lobby groups will come and go, aiming to revise or redact definitions, but when push comes to shove, a dictionary reports what a word means, not what it should mean. Just as better pay packets and career paths, community esteem and perception, will boost the lot of teachers. That and one clerihew I still know by heart.
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