I'm back - and it's Miss Williams now!

After four years away I am returning to blogging. Why have I been quiet for four years? I became a teacher...

Anybody who has ever been a teacher will understand. Four years in and I have only just managed to find a minute! I love teaching, not because of the holidays (of which I spend most of the time preparing to go back to work or sleeping off a run of 60 hour weeks), but because every day I get to shape people. I get to show people something they don't yet know. I get to help people find a better way to approach a problem. I get to assist in making people become more tolerant, well rounded, more confident people.

While training as a teacher; tired, stressed, skinny on black coffee and no time for dinner, I read this quote by Dr Haim Ginott:

'I've come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It's my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or de-humanized.'

As teachers, parents (the very first teachers) and those who work with children and young people, we wield immense power. We get to shape the adults of the future while they are still malleable and open to whatever we are willing to show them. The people who will be in charge tomorrow, learn from us today how to be and who to be. Our every action and reaction; all that we model through our own behaviour is absorbed. That is power.

When I was a child (and even into my early twenties) if you had asked me what my goal was, I would have told you that I wanted to change the world. I imagined myself as an esteemed leader, fixing the wrongs of a broken planet one by one. I was 25 when I became a teacher and I discovered that I had given myself a gift; the power to change the world. I know now that change happens slowly and nobody does it alone, but each year I have got to play some part in shaping 30 people. I got to decide the weather in the classroom, I got to instill knowledge and understanding - not just of the curriculum - of life, of forgiveness, of self-respect.

I didn't become an ambassador. I didn't go to work at the UN. I haven't solved the problems of hunger, war or inequality. But so far I have taught 120 children about these issues and others that are close to my heart. I hope and believe that some of what they have learned will stick and will shape in some way how those 120 children view the world and their place within it.

I do hope that I can manage to balance interests like writing on my blog with teaching, now that I am four years in and I've learned a few tricks. But if I disappear again, it's not because I've been knocked over, I'm just busy changing the world.