How Can We Honor The Teachers Who Shape Tomorrow's World?

How Can We Honor The Teachers Who Shape Tomorrow's World? Sunday, October 5 is World Teachers’ Day. Unesco organized the global celebration in 1994 as an opportunity to honor the teachers who commit their lives to educating our children. The date commemorates the 1966 and 1997 UNESCO Recommendations on the Status of Teachers and Higher Education Teaching Personnel. Teachers don’t get the reverence they deserve and events like World Teachers’ Day remind us of how important and challenging the work of education is in a rapidly moving technologically changing global world. The Varkey GEMS Foundation’s $1 million Global Teacher Prize--imagined like a Nobel Prize for teachers--is another attempt to bring more esteem to the teaching profession. I’m honored to be one of the judges involved in awarding this prize. The deadline to nominate a teacher or to apply yourself is October 12, 2014. And already, there are applications from over 150 countries. As a judge, I can’t submit a nomination. But in honor of World Teachers’ Day, I gave a lot of thought to who I would nominate if I could. I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t possibly choose just one teacher. So many teachers have helped me discover my own strengths and intellectual desires.