A selfless profession


A friend of mine recently asked me, “Why do you teach?” I got me thinking a lot about the nature of the job and why I really got into it at all. For me, it is all about relationships and experiences. I enjoy working with young people. I suppose I feel like I can maybe live vicariously through them and maybe that their pleasure can keep me motivated. Or maybe I have just seen Lean on Me too many times. For those individuals who read this and are not educators I can tell you that there are few Joe Clarks out there and the students aren’t exactly the eager young minds on the screen.
This is my third year as an educator and I still don’t have a fucking clue what I’m doing. I have a better understanding of what is going on with my job but I definitely don’t have it “covered”. My college experience did not exactly prepare me for what I have encountered in my tenure. I know the basics about grammatical study, language, writing, literature analysis, and all that good academic jargon. And while I know my content, my classroom skills were not nearly as polished. That is the thing I was not taught. How do you get a kid to want to learn? It is something I struggle with everyday. I thought the content would be enough. English is the best subject on the planet. The study of language is both vast and intricate. The best thing about English is that it is all about articulation and conviction. If someone believes something strong enough and can justify their argument, they usually are correct.
One mistake that I have realized that I made was to assume that students would be mirror images of myself. I will admit that I was definitely an academic in high school. School was priority #1 and sports were a close #2. Social interactions with the opposite sex hadn’t yet crept into my mental universe. I was also pushed by my parents. I was pushed very hard by my parents. I am not saying it was a bad thing because it was not. Part of a parents' responsibility is to push their child to their ultimate potential. I guess I always wanted to be able to understand the world around me and find out as much as I could. The world fascinates me and I thought that when I became a teacher my students would be equally enamored by the limitless possibilities that academia could provide.
I was wrong. I was DEAD wrong. I am not that old, but I don’t remember education being like this. One thing that I see on a daily basis is the amount of disdain for authority. I was told not to take it personally by a school administrator, that it is part of the job. Being cursed out was never part of my idea of “normalcy”. This contempt is not just directed at teachers but at parents. I have heard parents referred to by their first name, called every form of obscenity possible and had their position renounced as a joke. People see this ideological shift of rebellion and teenage angst and believe that it is part of the tradition of the maturation process. I know about rebellion, but what I have seen is malicious gross disrespect.
Some people blame the students. They should know the difference between right and wrong and be aware of proper class decorum but if the respect isn’t happening at home what can possibly happen at school? I am supposed to represent the parental influence at school. I hope that when I am blessed with children that they will not act like a bunch of retarded gangbangers. There are some smartass kids in school, but that is a result of the punk ass parents at home. My parents were badasses! They did NOT fuck around. What they say went and I knew that. Corporal punishment was common in my home. I think that the fear that was in place has been eradicated in the liberal age of political correctness. My parents work for the department of children and family services and they kicked my ass on a regular basis. Did I deserve it? Probably, at least most of the time. The biggest mistake EVER in public education was the dismissal of corporal punishment. It changed EVERYTHING. I believe that with the removal of a threat of REAL discipline (students see suspensions as a “paid vacation”) permanently tainted the teacher/student dynamic.
Students do have a different set of problems than I remember. The biggest thing I remember worrying about were succeeding in sports and picking out the college I wanted to go to. Some students have absentee parents, abusive girlfriends/boyfriends, pregnancy issues, or in some cases are just homeless. How is it possible to educate someone who doesn’t even have a home to go to? I doubt transcendentalism is high on their priority list. I will admit that I don’t deal well with the human element at times. I just am not used to highly emotional people and I feel overwhelmed by all the personal drama at times.
Sometimes I feel that there are so many problems that I can barely hear myself think. I want to try to focus on the positives. Contrary to what the federally mandated No Child Left Behind act (which is mathematically impossible, read The Bell Curve) there are some successes in school. That is the conundrum about young people. They have the capacity for brilliance, if they want to achieve it. Students are both brilliant and lazy, confident and terrified, tough and fragile. It is a tough task to try to negotiate the map of the human mind.
This leads back to the original question. Why do I do what I do? Because I believe I can possibly change one person’s life and maybe show them a way to change the world around them in a positive way. There might be a barrage of condescension in the path of success, but I believe that the journey is worth it. I have seen the look in the face of a student who finally understood my cryptic insights and to see them look like they just conquered the world is a feeling which gives me the strength to deal with the other hell spawn. I cannot save every student and not every student is worth saving, but the few that are help fulfill the educational utopia that I hope to one day create.