To see passion in the eyes of the young kids I teach as I go to classrooms everyday affirms my love for traveling. It pretty much reminds me of the awe I encounter when I set my foot on a foreign land.
Travel is something that fuels my teaching passion and I firmly believe that as a teacher, the quest for new places, new experiences surpass the importance of professional development.
While we cannot deny the fact that Travel makes way for chaos when unplanned, dedicating your personal time will prove it is worth it. Planning is all it takes to debunk the doubts that comes with it – that it is a waste of money and time.
Read: Mamey’s Story
Unleash the wanderlust in you as I state my personal reasons why teachers should travel.
Table of Contents
1. Travel is integral to a lifelong-learning process
Being a teacher means you pour out your own knowledge and experiences to young children of the generation. To secure that there is steady supply of these learnings, one must seek out all the learnings we can gather outside the classroom.
In any subject you are teaching, may it be a History or Literature, you can tickle their imaginations by inserts of Personal Travel. You should be aware of the inspiration you are imparting to them which converts your stories to goals. So the next time you visit Sagrada Familia in Spain, St. Mark’s Basilica in Italy or St. Paul’s Cathedral in London take a picture and share the excitement to the children. If you are a Music teacher, snap a picture of you crossing Downton abbey in portrayal of the Beatles.
Though this sound steep especially for teachers having families. Being attune with local gems can do. Visit our national parks over the weekend, attend an art gallery exhibition and immerse yourself to new experiences. The point isn’t where or how grand the travel is, it is to impart the students the importance of filling life with goals and making life meaningful. So get into the car, hop on a bus, hail a jeepney and just get to the destination.
Sooner or later when you bump into your students in the future, they will thank you for inspiring them to travel and it’s definitely priceless.
2. Travel introduces you to new perspectives.
When you immerse to a new culture, new food, new set of customaries, your point of view broadens. You adapt easily and makes you fully aware of learnings you can pick up at your surroundings.
As they say, the best way to preach is by practice. Telling your students to explore without doing it yourself is fruitless. Be proactive about sucking up on all available knowledge. Learn today, tomorrow and the day after. Never stop learning.
3. Travel puts you in the shoes of learning students.
When you travel, you are overwhelmed of the things happening in front of you. Even if you have the privilege of googling greetings and basic gestures, the actual thing you see during traveling is much more harder. The information overload puts you into anxious state. A certain pressure comes with it because you need to learn it as fast as you can so Traveling will happen smoothly.
Just like the kids, they undergo into several stages in life where we measure up things they do as accomplishments, the time when they first read, recite a poem, went to school without crying they all have stuttered to read, mispronounce a word in a poem and cried with their heads on their notebooks.
In ways more than one Travel is the closest thing a teacher like I am can relate to the struggles of my students. Traveling for the first time is very much like the kids leaving their home to study at school, out of comfort zone, new faces to see and information travels faster than the speed of light. Understanding your students puts more context to my calling, when I understand their struggles, it helps me teach them effectively.
Read: Rickshaw Ride in India
4. Travel reconnects us with our life and make our jobs meaningful
There can be times when we feel burnout at work, that’s because we don’t feel we are living the life. So taking travels, even just visiting your family’s province instill the feeling of you not only doing your work but a passion of sharing knowledge to kids.
Feeling drained out? Open that browser and book that trip that will recharge you with batteries full of stories to share the kids, looking at you with passion just like I have always dreamed of it.
What about you? What are your reasons to travel?
Read: A Cycle to a Hidden Treasure: Story of a Teacher and a Traveler
