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The day was also marked by the enactment of the law that puts an end to the double Teacher Evaluation and strengthens the pedagogical work.
As part of the commemoration of Teachers’ Day, the Chilean Ministry of Education launched the spot #HistoriaDeMiProfe, starring Jaime San Martín, 2023 National Prize for Exact Sciences and associate researcher at the Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM) of the University of Chile.
The meeting, held at the National Museum of Fine Arts, also included a reflective meeting on the mark left by teachers in the lives of their students. There, the Vice President of the Republic, Carolina Tohá; the Minister of Education, Nicolás Cataldo; the head of UTP of the Emilia Láscar School, Carolina Morales; and the saxophonist and orchestra conductor, Andrés Pérez, talked with the teachers who marked their lives: Raquel Salinas, Lorena Cortés, María Elena Fernández and Carl Hammond, respectively.
Vice President Carolina Tohá stated that “teachers are often questioned in their professional authority and in their role of social authority. This is incompatible with a good education. We have to find a way to cultivate an authority that is coherent with the principles in which we believe today”.
“The best gift we can give teachers today is to ask ourselves about how we can rebuild that concept (…). It has to be a teacher to whom we recognize that he or she is there for something and must have the space to be able to do so, because only in that way will we allow them to develop and show their abilities, their vocation and their affection for their students, which in the end is an affection for Chile”, he added.
The Vice President of the Republic of Chile, Carolina Tohá. Photo: Alonso Farías.
For his part, Minister Nicolás Cataldo affirmed that “from the Ministry of Education we are committed to promoting recognition so that pedagogy becomes a more prestigious career each year. One way to improve the experience of teachers is going to be to complement the current development system with a management trajectory system.”
“This is a moment in which the problems of school coexistence and the changes in the dynamics of schools lead us to face the discussion of pedagogical authority, of what today represents the characteristics of what it is to be a teacher. Therefore, as a society, we must once again value a profession as important as that of the teacher”, he added.
The Minister of Education, Nicolás Cataldo. Photo: Alonso Farías.
Story of my Professor
One of the protagonists of the day was Jaime San Martín, professor at the Universidad de Chile and winner of the 2023 National Prize for Exact Sciences, who appeared in the spot #HistoriaDeMiProfe, which is part of a Mineduc campaign to value the role of teachers.
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San Martín said that “it is a tremendous honor for me to have participated in this ceremony. I would like to send a message to the generations that are in school today and to the next ones: respect your teachers. Teaching is the best thing that can happen to us in life, being a student and being a teacher, teachers are the ones who help us understand who you are, what you are going to do, what you like. Without teachers we would be nothing”.
The CMM research associate added that “the most complicated trauma we have at this time are the pandemic years that left us very complicated and that we have to do something, something special in these three or four years to come. We cannot think that our students come with the skills they had five years ago and we teachers have to invest in that”.
Jaime San Martín, together with ministers Nicolás Cataldo, Jeannette Jara, Álvaro Elizalde and Carolina Tohá. Photo: Alonso Farías.
The meeting was also attended by the Minister Secretary General of the Presidency, Álvaro Elizalde; the Minister of Labor and Social Security, Jeannette Jara; the Undersecretary of Early Childhood Education, Claudia Lagos; the Director of Public Education, Jaime Veas; and the Director of the National Museum of Fine Arts, Varinia Brodsky, among other authorities and representatives of civil society.
By Alonso Farías Ponce, CMM journalist.
