Let’s say it as it is: teachers don’t go to school. They go to work. School is for students.
Teachers step through those same iron gates carrying not bags of books, but the weight of a nation’s future. They don’t enter to be taught; they enter to teach.
They don’t attend; they attend to.
Think about it. A student’s mission is personal: attend classes, jot notes, dodge assignments, pass exams and climb the ladder of grades.
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A teacher’s mission is universal: prepare lessons, fight ignorance like a stubborn weed, light fires of curiosity and shape lives with chalk stained hands.
Both walk through the same dusty gate, but under different contracts with destiny. To say teachers ‘go to school’ is like saying the referee came to play football.
It’s like confusing the cook with the diner, or the mason with the stone.
Language betrays us. The moment we say ‘teachers go to school,’ we strip their professional dignity without even noticing.
It reduces their calling to mere attendance, as if their role were no higher than the Form One boy still learning how to wear a tie straight.
You would never tell a doctor, ‘You’re going to hospital today,’ as though she were going to get an injection instead of performing surgery. You would never tell a pilot, ‘You’re going to the airport today,’ as though he were lining up at the boarding gate. But we say it to teachers every day. And it is wrong.
Teachers don’t go to school. They go to work.
And what work it is! Work that begins before dawn when the cock crows in the village or when the matatus start honking in the city.
Work that demands lesson plans, schemes of work and red pens that bleed over careless handwriting. Work that follows teachers home in the form of exercise books piled like anthills in nylon bags.
Work that continues even in sleep as they replay that stubborn class in their minds, wondering how to make algebra dance for them tomorrow.
Students see a timetable as punishment; teachers see it as duty. Students fear exams; teachers craft them.
Students curse homework; teachers call it follow up. Students are busy consuming knowledge, while teachers are burning calories producing it.
When a student hears the bell, it signals freedom. When a teacher hears the same bell, it signals the next battle.
A student’s school is a place to be formed. A teacher’s school is a workplace, an office, a factory of minds.
The classroom is their cubicle. The chalkboard is their desk. The red pen is their signature stamp.
The staffroom; with its mismatched chairs, boiling kettle and chipped tin cups; is their boardroom. The staff meeting is their corporate AGM, complete with heated arguments, laughter and the occasional thunder from the deputy head.
This is no playground. It is work of the highest order. To stand before forty restless teenagers whose bodies are present but whose minds are roaming in TikTok clouds and still command attention; that is theatre, discipline and leadership rolled into one.
To explain fractions for the seventh time without losing patience is not just skill; it is saintly endurance.
To keep teaching in leaking classrooms, with broken windows and chalk dust rising like smoke, requires a resilience that no job description captures.
Students go to school to be built. Teachers go to work to build. Students are temporary tenants; teachers are permanent architects.
Students graduate and move on; teachers remain, bricklayers of human destiny, constructing generation after generation.
Every teacher is a mason whose bricks are words, whose cement is patience, and whose building is the nation itself.
And this distinction matters. Because the way we speak shapes the way we value. If we keep saying teachers ‘go to school,’ we will keep treating their work like child’s play.
We will keep underpaying them, underestimating them and underrating the sacred labour they perform.
But when we say teachers ‘go to work,’ we restore their honour. We see them not as people hanging around classrooms, but as professionals on whose sweat and chalk dust shoulders every other profession stands.
Look around: every doctor, engineer, lawyer, driver, pastor and even president once sat in front of a teacher with a piece of chalk.
Teaching is the womb of every career, the mother of all professions. And yet society still imagines teachers ‘just go to school.’ What a lie. What a shame.
The truth is this: not everyone could last a day in the shoes of a Kenyan teacher. The early mornings, the noisy classrooms, the endless marking, the staffroom politics, the expectations of parents and the discipline issues that sometimes make you wonder whether to pray or to resign.
But they keep showing up. They keep working. They keep planting seeds of knowledge even in rocky soil. And one day, those seeds become doctors, judges, innovators, presidents.
Every lesson taught is a future crisis prevented. Every correction made is a destiny salvaged. Every encouragement whispered is a life redirected. This is not ‘going to school.’ This is labour. Heavy labour. Holy labour.
So let it be said boldly and repeated until it sticks: students go to school. Teachers go to work. Never confuse the two.
One attends to be shaped, the other arrives to shape. One consumes, the other produces. One will graduate and disappear, the other stays to anchor the ship.
So from today, choose your words carefully. Don’t ask a teacher, ‘Are you going to school?’ That question belongs to the boy in worn out shoes carrying a leaking fountain pen. Ask instead, ‘Are you going to work?’ Because teaching is work.
Work that leaves chalk dust on your sleeves, ink stains on your fingers, tea in your stomach and generations in your debt.
And perhaps, when Kenya finally embraces this truth, we will start treating teachers as what they truly are: not people attending school, but professionals holding together the very foundation of civilization.
Raphael Ng’ang’a, a seasoned teacher of English and writer, is passionate about language, literature and the dignity of teaching.
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By Raphael Ng’ang’a