Instructor or Educator: What’s the Difference?

Think of all the terms that are used to describe someone who works in the world of learning: teacher (the most commonly used term), instructor, tutor, demonstrator, professor, educator... The list goes on. In this article I want to explore the distinction between “instructor” and “educator.” Let me begin with a story.

Some time ago, I was at a dinner party in Hong Kong. The host was throwing the party for his wife, who was celebrating a “significant birthday.” No mention was made of her age, but it didn’t take much imagination to deduce that the party had been arranged to celebrate her 50th birthday. I only knew one or two other people at the party, and found myself seated towards the end of the dining table next to a pleasant younger woman who looked Chinese but spoke with a British accent. During the course of the evening, I learned that she was in fact Malaysian-Chinese but had been brought up and educated in England. We then found ourselves in a three-way conversation with the man sitting across who asked her what she did.

“I’m a teacher,” she replied.

“Oh, really, what do you teach?”

“I teach young people.”

The questioner looked surprised. Clearly, he had expected our dining companion to identify herself in terms of her subject specialization, such as “I teach mathematics” or “I teach geography.” He then proceeded to quickly change the subject. Later, when dinner was over and we were on the terrace having coffee, I returned to the brief conversation I had overheard at the dinner table. “So what subject do you teach?” I asked. “Well, English is the subject,” she replied, “but I consider myself a teacher of young people first and a language teacher second.”

The complete article can be found in Issue #277 of the Tokyo Journal. Click here to order from Amazon.