The Passion of a Teacher

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The job of a teacher is so often considered to be to make sure students know what is required of them, preparing them for becoming productive, understanding citizens. Dry and drab, the dark corridors of learning. However, teaching is so much more than this. It is a passion that drives a teacher to make a difference in the life of a student - an enthusiasm for teaching and an instinct for garnering the enthusiasm within the class, bringing colour and light to learning.

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A teacher that is able to impart their love for knowledge and a thirst for knowing more will have reached a student in ways beyond just learning. Therein lies our goal. A good teacher may inspire a student to become someone they never thought they could be, or to work in a field that they did not realise even existed. When a teacher hears back from a past student and realises that their passion was passed on, it feeds their desire to teach, reinforcing the fact that what they do makes a difference. This letter from Yemaya Morely, a senior student from 2019, is a great example of exactly that - a passion for a subject driven by a passionate teaching team.

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Ms Tana Scott

Geography and EMS

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Letter from Former Pupil Yemaya Morley

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The world of environmental management and geography, introduced to me by Ms. Scott, really became everything I was interested in. In school, I put more effort into my other subjects, because getting better in those subjects meant I was bettering my environmental management skills and marks. It paid off in the end, results-wise, but more importantly, is how this passion for environmental management and geography has paid off in other areas of my life.

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I haven’t studied, yet, so the academics are still on hold. But everything I’ve experienced since leaving school has been influenced by this passion. I’ve lived in rural Vietnam, traveled South Africa, taught science to amazingly talented kids, and am currently traveling Thailand. Visiting any natural wonder, I end up spending enough time to annoy anyone with me trying to absorb the information on the botanical placards, and any other informative boards, like the benefits of a healthy mangrove, or the formation of limestone monoliths, or whatever else I may find along the way (it doesn’t end).

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This has become such a natural nuance to my travels and experiences, like my brain has been programmed to think in this pattern and language. It gives things a depth that I’m so grateful to experience.

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I recently completed my rescue diver course, which had to be preceded by both an open water and advanced water diver course. I had initially planned to do the three-day open water course, and ended up extending my stay with the dive school for 3 weeks to complete the courses that followed, and amassing over 1000 minutes under water. In these courses, you get to choose a few elective dives, which can be of a more technical nature, like learning to use enriched air, or of the more nature-geek nature, like fish identification. I’m sure by this point you can guess which one I opted for. Half of my fish ID dive was spent in a frantic whale shark chase – I didn’t catch it (I know…) – and the other half was my instructor laughing at me with a mask full of water because I couldn’t wipe the cheesy grin off of my face when I got the name of a fish right!

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There is no doubt in my mind that when I get tired of living out of a backpack and decide it’s time to study, it will be this that I study and that the course of the rest of my life will be directed by the flow of this subject and all she has to show me!

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Thanks goes to Rundle for facilitating this passion, and, of course, to Tana for noticing the nature-freak in me and nurturing her, and for continually hyping up my travels and all the nature pictures I send!