A teacher, not a babysitter, please

We’ve got a bit of a problem here. People often confuse the kindergarten teacher with the babysitter. They completely overlook her educational role.

Kindergarten teacher is an important profession. At a crucial time in a child’s development, she works to enable the child to develop his or her personality, abilities and interests in every way. She tries to build a positive attitude towards cognition and thus creates a stepping stone to further education. It tries to ensure that the transition into the role of a school child is as smooth as possible so that the young pupil does not lose motivation due to initial setbacks. Sometimes, however, no one seems to appreciate this difficult task…

Kindergarten teachers are more like babysitters in the eyes of society these days. After all, they drink coffee all day, chat with their colleagues, just supervise the children or at most play with them a little and still get paid for it. That’s cool, right?

What a kindergarten teacher actually does

Well, no… Being a kindergarten teacher is a much bigger deal. It’s a lot harder to do in the first place you need the proper training. Liking kids isn’t really enough. You have to know a little bit of everything. You have to know the developmental stages of children. Mix Czech into the educational activities, …math, science, art, music and physical education. Use the basics of psychology, speech therapy or educational diagnostics when working with children. In addition, it is useful to take a course in first aid, just in case.

Then there is the question of the personal skills of the teacher.
Ideally, in addition to a smile and a kind word, you should also have natural authority,
management skills and mental resilience.
That’s the only way to manage a classroom full of children who are sometimes like a bag of fleas.

In the mummery of nursery traffic you then spend the whole day trying to identify and meet the individual needs of the child.– Like making sure Tony doesn’t get pasta sauce, because then he won’t touch his lunch. –

You also keep a close eye on whether someone has a problem that needs to be picked up and dealt with in time, while parents think you’re just looking for faults in their child and nagging unnecessarily. – So that pre-schooler Annie doesn’t keep whining about needing to blow her nose. –

And, of course, you’re leading the kids to be independent and responsible, because otherwise you’re not going to get to do anything proper because of serving so many mommies. – So that Filip the truant can finally start going to speech therapy and learn to say S. –

Sometimes you have to substitute parents in raising children. It is expected that you will teach your children everything in kindergarten even without the interest and support of the family background, that you will be able to cope even with a child who cannot cope at home, that you will be prepared for everything possible and impossible.

What about the acting? The preschool age is simply a period in which children learn about the world through play, develop their intellect and learn to communicate. So yes, children do play in preschool. Teachers need to set up these playful activities in such a way that they not only engage and entertain the children for a while, but ideally, the children are also learning and practicing unobtrusively during play. They have to be quite creative in this respect, because they can’t just shove a phone at the children or turn on the TV.

How to explain this to parents

If parents realized this, if they knew what a teacher’s job in kindergarten entails, ignorance and underestimation would surely turn into admiration and appreciation. But parents often don’t know this. They know what they do at home and what they do at work. But they don’t know exactly what you do at work. They usually don’t learn much from their children.

Perhaps it would help to educate them by sending them interesting articles about the stages of child development and their milestones.
Or regularly showing them what you do with children and how it specifically develops them.
With the Twigsee app this is easy to do.

Parents will catch on and understand what an important and responsible task you have taken on. Not only do you take care of the children in your care on a daily basis, but you also stimulate the development of their brains every weekday and ensure their all-round development. Keep doing what you are doing. with the confidence and knowledge that you are setting the tone for their future lives.

11. 4. 2023 | Martina Zatloukalová