He strongly endorses the current trend for young people to chase new and higher sets of credentials. However, he emphasises the importance of life experiences as well as academic learning. "The teacher who has moved from school door to school door to school door," says Luk, "is a common phenomenon not only in Hong Kong, but worldwide. A teacher who, in other words, has gone to university straight from school and then upon graduation returns to school as a teacher, has narrowed the experiences which can help to shape him or her as an effective teacher."
However well qualified, the experience such a teacher would bring to pupils and colleagues in the school community would be necessarily narrow. He cites the example of his son's favourite teacher - trained as a nuclear engineer, this man gave up engineering after several years and decided to try something new. He took up pig farming; he worked as a butcher; he eventually decided he wanted to deal with life rather than death and therefore trained as a teacher. He finally became a fabulously effective high school teacher of Physics.
Luk's advice to today's student teachers:
"Broaden your experiences and you will become better teachers."
