The role of the teacher in Chile has changed throughout the years. First teachers in our country were monks coming mostly from Spain, whose main role was to teach natives their language and religion. At that time, the teacher was a very respectful person even though they never studied to teach, it was more like a missionary because they never got paid for their serviceThen, during the republic period the state started taking care of the education in the country, so people external from the church started teaching and with so people started changing the way they used to see the teachers, teachers were no longer seen as "saints", they were normal people trained to teach other people how to adapt to this new developing society. After that, the role of the teacher has changed and now teachers have to teach a lot more than just maths, languages and discipline. .
Teachers today have to give students all the education they don't receive either from their homes or the society. This happened because the role of the families changed too. Both father and mother work nowadays and because of that, children are raised by other members of the family (uncle, aunt, grandparents, etc.) or somebody external who gets paid to take care of them. All this social changes have ended up giving the teacher responsibilities that go farther than just teaching a subject. That's the reason why the role of the head teacher is very important in order to build a more valuable society.
This semester was the first time I experienced a "consejo de curso" as a teacher. They don't really do that much; students just organize activities to earn money for the party or trip they are planning to do by the end of the year. But what I saw it was really important was how the head teacher always knew everything about his students. While the students were organizing activities the head teacher would ask one by one something about their lives, marks or family.
