World Teachers’ Day has always been one of my favourite days to mark on this blog. That is probably not a surprise. I come from a family of teachers. I started teaching at 22. I met my wife through education. Thirty years after I first walked into a classroom, it remains the only profession I have ever known.
This year the day feels close to the surface. Since the start of school last month, I have had the chance to spend real time with teachers new to our district, and they have reminded me what this work looks like when it is fresh. They are teaching and prepping and marking and coaching and building their practice, and they are loving it. I have also heard the stories of teachers who packed up their lives and relocated to be here. I feel that responsibility keenly. They came to support our students. Part of my job is to ensure we support them just as fully.
It has also been heartening to see our applicant pools growing again. In the years immediately after COVID, there were positions where the number of applicants was noticeably smaller than what we had traditionally seen. More recently, that has begun to shift. People are choosing teaching. They are choosing this work knowing it is not the job their parents’ generation signed up for, but they see the same opportunity to make a difference.
Back in 2010, on one of the first World Teachers’ Days I wrote about here, I said I was good with teacher. That it was who I am, and that it said it all. Sixteen years later I still believe that. But I understand the title a little differently now.
As chosen by UNESCO, this year’s theme fits: “Standing with teachers: 60 years of protecting the profession, advancing its status and shaping our futures.” Sixty years is a long time. Almost everything about schools has changed across those decades. And yet the thing that makes a teacher matter has not moved at all.
The profession I entered in 1996 is not the one someone enters today. Teachers now navigate artificial intelligence, digital citizenship, mental health, changing parent expectations and increasingly complex learning needs in ways that would have been hard to imagine when I started. And the work will keep changing. Some of the more routine parts will likely change or fall away as AI takes on more of the planning, assessment, communication and administration. The classroom of 2036 will not look like the classroom of 2026.
But I am increasingly convinced that the most important parts of teaching are stubbornly resistant to all of it.
Great teachers know their students. They notice when something is off. They know when to push and when to ease up. They build places where young people feel they belong because they do. Technology can support every one of those things, and I hope it does. None of these can be automated.
I saw a version of this recently. I was in a classroom where a teacher had structured her groups beautifully. One group was getting feedback directly from her. Another was working through revisions. A third was getting feedback from AI. Over the week the students rotated, so everyone had each experience on different days.
She had tightened the feedback loop without making every piece of it run through her. The technology did not replace her. It extended her reach, and it freed her to spend her attention where only she could.
That is the version of the future I am hopeful about. Not one where the teacher matters less, but one where the teacher is freed to do more of what only a teacher can do.
And maybe that is why over the years I keep coming back to Mrs. Caffrey, my teacher in Grades 2, 3 and 4. I arrived in her room barely reading and left three years later a different learner. What I remember has almost nothing to do with curriculum. She knew me. She held me accountable. She made me feel safe.
This past June my Grade 7 class gathered for our 40-year reunion. Everyone in that room had their own story about a teacher who had changed something for them. I had always known what Mrs. Caffrey meant to me and to my family. What I learned that weekend was how many others carried her with them too.
Close to fifty years after I first walked into elementary school, knowing students, holding them to high expectations and making them feel safe still seem like pretty good descriptors of great teaching.
Teachers rarely get to see the full weight of what they do. Mrs. Caffrey never did. She had no idea that, forty years on, a room full of us would still be saying her name.
Most of the teachers who shaped me had no idea they were doing it at the time. You make hundreds of small decisions a day and have thousands of conversations over a career, and every so often one of them quietly changes where a life goes.
Thirty years in, I am still optimistic about this work.
The profession is evolving, as it always has. The tools will change. The expectations will change. The classrooms will change. The chance to make a difference in the world, one student at a time, does not.
So I come back to what I wrote sixteen years ago. I am still good with teacher. It is still who I am. Thirty years later, I still cannot think of a better title.
Happy World Teachers’ Day.
Note: The image at the top of this post was generated using AI. I also used AI tools for editorial feedback while refining the piece. The arguments and conclusions are my own.