Teaching vs Training Vs Facilitation

[ymnisky]

Thanks Raymott, that is exactly what I was asking.

[ymnisky]

Originally Posted by Raymott

The reality is that no-one would call their professor "teacher" in any English-speaking country I know of.
Consider Professor John Smith PhD.
They would call him Professor Smith, Dr. Smith, Professor, Doctor, or John.
This is usually sorted out in the first class, where he will say something like "You may call me Professor Smith, or Doctor Smith or John - as long as you do it politely - but not Mr. Smith. I worked a long time for that doctorate! <laughter>".
So, no he generally wouldn't be offended. He'd be vaguely amused and puzzled, depending on his personality, because he may never have heard it before.
However, if you called him "teacher" in a way that was obviously sarcastic - implying that he wasn't much of a teacher at all, then yes, he would quite rightly be offended. I've never seen this happen.

PS: In fact, no one at all is called "teacher" that I can think of.
A school teacher is either 'Sir', 'Miss", Mr Smith, Miss Smith, Mrs Smith. Perhaps in some progressive schools these days, it might be John or Mary.
(Again, this BrE, AusE usage, which tends to be similar as far as education systems go).

After reading and rereading the posts above, I concluded that we have three distinct categories here:
- titles
- positions
- names
And "teacher" is a position, not a title. It is similar to "student". It is not common for a pupil to be called by the noun "student" the same way it is not common for the class leader to be called by the noun "teacher".

One of the main reasons for this misleading regarding the usage of "teacher" is that in many non-English-speaking countries it is common to address the instructor as the equivalent of "teacher" (as it were a 'title').

But ...
I have recently watched the movie "Fisty of Fury" (1972) (US title:The Chinese Connection) with Bruce Lee. In this movie, the character Chen Zhen (Bruce Lee) addresses his master as "teacher", more than once.
Particularly when his masters dies, he calls desperately: "Teacher, teacher, teacher, ... "

[ymnisky]

I would like to add that one reason for this point to be a bit confusing for ESL students is the different usage of similar/equivalent terms by other languages.

For instance, in Portuguese, there is a single word "professor" (it is written the same as in English) related to the two English "professor" and "teacher". Usually in Portuguese "professor" is not a title, rather has the same meaning as "teacher" in English.