My experience as a TEACH South Africa Ambassador – Mothupi Kgopa

“It’s been a challenging ride. I thought teaching was the simplest job I could do, but I was wrong. Each year I meet learners whose behaviour I must engineer and whose characters I must mould.

I will remember this experience forever – I contributed my time, energy, resources, and intellectual abilities to the sons and daughters of South Africa. By being involved in this initiative, I have altered learners’ intellectual skills and their outlook on life. TEACH South Africa Ambassadors are a new crop of graduates in pursuit of significance and not success.

Significance is the contribution one makes on earth, while success is what one achieves in one’s own life. The former changes lives and the latter does not. We are driven by knowing we are not going to live forever, so the need to touch lives and make a difference should be all the more urgent.

I recall when I was trying to become the very best ambassador, I had an altercation with a learner and he refused to leave my class.

After the serious confrontation he looked at me and said, “Fotsek!” It was not the educator who had changed, but the learner. And it was not the learner who had to take a new approach, but the educator. It was at this point that I knew: I had arrived. After a deep breath I said to myself, ‘Let the games begin!’

This year marks the most challenging year of my life as I am also working towards my honours degree in Journalism at Wits and a PGCE (Foundation Phase and Early Childhood Development) at the University of Johannesburg. This is just another way I am trying to be my best.

Someone once said, ‘We have met the enemy, and he is us’. When you plan, and do not execute,

I believe you become your own enemy. I always try to channel my energies into developmental issues and not petty politics.”

To read Mothupi Kgopa’s full profile, please click on this link,