Teaching as an activity is a direct example of vocation. Something that people or an individual dedicate his or her life to do out of passion just like artwork.
It is very difficult as I will say to see someone who is a painter doing his or her painting out of a result of something or reason but the love for the work (painting). Just imagine for yourself how many people are carpenters or painters because someone has forced them to be painting or join carpentry. Most of these painters we see around do it purposely because they have passion or love for painting, this is not the case when it comes to teaching.
In the case of teachers, a teacher who is not motivated by a passion to teach, carry on his or her teaching to prevent learning more than facilitating learning. All of us know that is true because when you were students suffering under a countless number of classes taught by people who just do the teaching as a job and not the passion to teach.
That is the problem we are faced with our basic education in Ghana we know teaching to be treated like a vocation but some people in the sector just do the work as they wish or because they want money they enter into the teaching field and when they realize that teaching job does not pay then they treat the teaching they way they want.
A vocation is the complete direct opposite of a profession
The professional mindset or thinking is so ubiquitous in modern culture that we don’t even notice it. At times you see some teachers do the work as if someone is forcing them to do it.
They feel that teaching is a job and they do it as such. This is not the case when it comes to vocation. Vocational mindset or thinking is completely different from this because they see the work they do as part of them and what they do has a direct impact on their lives. When you see a carpenter working he wants to do it and people will ask who roof this house or this building?
A true teacher never turns off. This means that for a teacher you never stop being a teacher even if you are not in the classroom. Be careful here, I’m not saying that when you are a teacher you should not do other things apart from planning and thinking about your students. What I’m simply trying to say here is you are the same person at home and in the class. You should not just wear your teacher’s face when you are in class with your students alone and you don’t avoid your students as other teachers do.
Most people do their work well without feeling that they are called but teaching is like other Jobs. Nowadays some unqualified teachers not that they have not passed well back in the school but because they feel like they don’t have anything to do that is why they are forced to be teachers and this is negatively affecting our teaching sector greatly.
All the time teachers are being tagged with bad names by their leaders not because they are not good ones among them but the few teachers that are not doing their work well are those causing their employers as well the general public to giving them bad names.