Eleni Tanou has been a teacher for 8 years. He has taught in the village of Zervi in Pella, in Xanthi, in Athens, in Thessaloniki and in Lipsi. She has also taught for three years in Vathi, Kalymnos, and this year she had to offer her services in Telendos. As she says, in an interview with the Rhodes newspaper “Demetiki”, she is grateful to God for what she has experienced so far in the classrooms of the so-called difficult schools and stresses that substitutes are the ones who keep the schools of the remote areas of the country standing.

This year, he is teaching students who live with their families on the island. One child in the first grade, two children in the third grade and five children in the fifth grade wait every day at the port for their teacher to come to the island’s one-room schoolhouse. At the same time, the children’s parents embraced the teacher and seemed to recognize her work from the very first moment, which she has not experienced in the big cities.

The experienced teacher, teaching for the first time in such a small school, has to deal with some peculiarities for the first time. From October, for example, the school will be left with only two students, as the rest will go to a school in Kalymnos when the season is over, as their parents will close their shops on the island and return to Kalymnos for the winter. The children will return to school in Telendos again after Easter. In fact, the teacher will, for the most part, complete the school year together with two children of the fifth grade.

In no case, however, will such peculiarities, but also problems that may arise due to the poor condition of the building in which the school is housed, undermine the morale of the teacher and affect the quality of her work. On the contrary, E. Tanou, as she states in her interview with Mary Fotis, does not see anything negative that would prevent her from teaching at the same school next year. He could not, however, mention the permanent source of stress for substitute teachers in our country: “Yet we substitutes live every year with the uncertainty of whether we will teach and which school we will be assigned to. For eight years I have been running from school to school in every corner of Greece, like all my fellow substitutes. Many leave their families behind to teach, others move their families to another city each year and start their lives over again each school year. We substitutes staff the so-called difficult schools, the ones that are hard to reach, remote from urban centres and that a permanent colleague would hardly choose to teach in. We don’t know what is in store for us and what we can expect for next year.”

Meet Eleni Tanou, the “teacher with the golden hair” of Telendos, through the interview she gave to Mary Fotis. The interview was published in the Rhodes newspaper “δημοκρατική”.