Why teach?

The Office of the Vice President for Faculty Affairs, in collaboration with the Human Resource Management Office and the School of Education and Human Development, organized a three-day seminar-workshop for new faculty members last July 17-19, 2019. The modules provided can be integrated into their daily teaching experiences and help enhance their teaching skills and competencies.

Among the 20 participants, 13 were from ages 22 to 30. So we asked them, “Why did you choose to teach?”

My reason for becoming a teacher is pretty much a cliché. I wanted to create a difference in the lives of our students. Upon seeing the harsh realities of the corporate world, I started to have this goal of tweaking the perspective of the students who are trying to engage with business and management by teaching them how to transform traditional business practices and workplaces

Nogin C. Bunda, School of Management

to a more humanized business and meaningful workplace. I thought that this could be possible if I teach in a university where students and faculty give importance to serving society as well as fostering integral human development. Hence, I decided to join the faculty of the School of Management in the hopes that I could share my goals with the students as well as with the faculty members.

I chose this profession because I want to motivate my students to go beyond mere theory. In Literature, we explore concepts like anger, pride, indifference, lust, and so forth. We see how characters deal with these things and more important, how they can redeem themselves. I am hoping that through these literary works, my students would be inspired to make prudent choices and live a graceful life.

I chose to be a teacher primarily because I felt that my love for learning would only have value if I could affect others with it. Not only did this choice enliven the pursuit of knowledge; in time, it made me realize that the way we view the world is brought into sharp focus in the classroom, and can be changed there. Along the way, education became less about fixed paradigms and mere grades, and more about a dialogical journey: my students challenged and educated me as much as I did them. In this shared process, my students and I are able to discover with wonder the beauty of reality that often is taken for granted—and this has given me an incredible amount of joy.

Many of my best experiences as a teacher actually happen outside the classroom, when I run into former students around the campus. As we are catching up, they always mention how philosophy has helped them in their other subjects, and even in their personal lives. Knowing this, in turn, is a big help when the challenges of teaching seem too much for me: Whether it takes as short a time as the one semester that I have with them, or as long as the rest of their lives, what I have taught definitely plays a part in who they are becoming.

Christina Alexandra G. Morales, College of Arts and Sciences

I chose this path because being an educator is an immensely noble profession. As an educator, you grow with your students by mentoring and guiding them to be agents of change in society. As a teacher, I believe I can help make a difference by shaping the future of young minds who will someday become professionals that will influence the world in a positive way. As an Information Technology educator, I was able to form Technology Professionals who will develop software or applications that will help make the lives of people easier.

It does feel good when people commend me for the work I have done, but I find more joy in doing things for the good of the institution. I initiated Innovatus, the official research journal of the SSE Department of Information Science and Technology, because I believe that it will help boost the research culture in the department and in the school. That assignment was quite a challenge, but I happily did it for UA&P.