"Just this week I put a current student in touch with an alum who was looking for a summer intern—I knew the student and what the alum was looking for, and I thought they’d be a good match. By Thursday she had the internship!" Lisa, from the University of Kansas, shared one way that she recently helped one of her students.

"It’s always nice to see when your students flourish. I also encourage (and have gotten the university to fund) students to attend an annual professional conference, to see what professionals in the field are doing and start to build their network. Every year a few students go, and they’re always happy to have had such an experience," she said.

"As for nice things students have done for me, I keep a folder of the handwritten notes I’ve received from students, telling me how they value what they learned from me or just thanks for being their teacher, and I read a couple when I have a bad day, to remind myself why I do this job," the professor revealed that these notes can help motivate her.

Speaking of motivation, the professor explained to us what educators can do to help guide and inspire their students. According to her, it's important that professors show the purpose of everything that they're doing at university.

"Relating concepts and skills to real-world activities can help many students understand not just what they’re doing but why. Explaining the purpose of big-picture things like a whole course as well as small things like individual assignments can help students understand why what they’re doing is relevant. Also, putting concepts and skills into the larger field can help students contextualize what they’re doing and see how it relates to things they’ve done before and things they’ll be doing at the next level," the professor told Bored Panda.

Meanwhile, we were curious as to how educators could subtly let a student know that they should put a bit more effort into their work. "The 'sandwich' method usually works pretty well: Tell the student something good about their work (bread), tell them how something could be better (filling), then tell them something else good, either about their work or about your confidence in their ability to do it (bread)," she explained the sandwich method of criticism.

"Some students want simple, direct feedback on what to fix, but many want to know that they’re at least on the right track and that their teacher thinks they can do it."

Teachers Tom Rose and Jack Pannett from the UK told Bored Panda during a previous interview that being an educator can be very stressful yet rewarding. Teachers need to be able to deal with a lot of unexpected situations. Planning is important, but being flexible and nimble enough to react to (sometimes unpleasant) surprises is vital, too.

“Box breathing’ is our ‘go-to’ method if we are stressed and want to calm down. Box breathing is a practice where you breathe in for 4 seconds, hold breath for 4 seconds, breathe out for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds and repeat until your heart rate slows down," Tom and Jack shared with us how they calm down if things get a tad too stressful.

The two teachers told us that it’s important to know your students well and to be aware of who might pose the most challenges. That will make it easier to manage their behavior in the future. What’s more, educators have to be very aware of their students’ parents as well. It’s very useful to be diplomatic when speaking to them or giving them advice about their kids. Parents also gossip. A lot.

Teachers Tom and Jack told Bored Panda that a lot of staff members are so busy taking care of everyone else that they can forget about their own health and wellbeing. They noted that teachers have to remember the basics: eating, getting enough sleep, taking time off to unwind after stressful periods.

According to psychotherapist Silva Neves, from the United Kingdom, human beings are hardwired to be kind. However, at the same time, human beings are constantly thinking about their own survival. So there’s an ongoing battle inside everyone about whether or not to be altruistic and to go the extra mile for someone else.

“Being kind is good for us because it gives us a sense of purpose, it raises our self-esteem, and it releases feel-good brain chemicals,” Silva told Bored Panda earlier.

“It [kindness] is also good for others, obviously. So kindness is actually something that we, humans, are naturally driven to be,” he said.

“The sense of kindness is in competition with our survival mode, so, as human beings, we tend to live in contradiction, between kindness (opening our arms) and protection (closing our arms),” the mental health expert explained to us that there’s a constant flux between being helpful to others and prioritizing what’s best for us.

Helping others can make you feel far more positive about life. What’s more, acts of altruism can also help put things into perspective and make you, well, happier. Kindness also has a way of spreading. Doing wholesome things for others inspires them to act in a similar way, in turn. Kindness leads to more kindness. And wholesome teachers create more wholesome students.

Sarah Vero, from ‘Action for Happiness,’ explained to Bored Panda earlier that happiness is closely linked to the concepts of duty and purpose.

"The 10 keys to happier living are giving, relating, exercising, awareness, trying out, direction, resilience, emotions, acceptance, and meaning. We are likely to be happier if our lives have direction, meaning and purpose and if we are part of something bigger than ourselves," Sarah shared with us.

"Giving or doing things for others is another example. Relating is about being connected to other people and being part of a community. Duty and purpose don't have to be serious things, being part of a cause that you care about or taking part in charity fundraising, all these things make us happy and fulfilled. We should see these things as acts of service that help us to be happy and help other people at the same time. Awareness is about appreciating each moment no matter what we are doing at the time,” she went into detail about the things we can all do that lead to happiness.

Thinking about others, not just ourselves, leads to more satisfaction with our lives. Altruism benefits everyone.

"Think about how you can reach out and do things for others, help a neighbor or volunteer for a cause, we get happiness high from helping other people,” she suggested.