You're probably reading this article because you've already started applying for jobs at retail locations and telecommunications companies. You got your undergraduate degree or you completed your alternative route program and you believed that you were going to change the world.Then, some twelve-year-old called you every foul name in the Modern English language on your second day of school... or the fifteenth... or the fiftieth, and it's been all downhill from there.
You're upset, and you feel like nobody is doing what they're supposed to do. The discipline is too relaxed. The paperwork is too consuming. The testing is nerve-wracking. The kids are ungrateful. The parents are sometimes degrading. The hours are just grueling, and the pay is barely enough for you to take care of your students and enjoy your summer vacation, which is overtaken by training, summer school district initiatives and unit planning.
Yet, I'm going to present you with a paradox. Education is a great, necessary evil. I share in your pains and frustrations, but teachers have been plagued with the problems of humanity since humanity began. Humans do not come out of the womb preprogrammed to function independently. A man's first teachers, his parents, are attached to a sort of whipping post where they must sacrifice all the niceties of life--private space, girls' nights out, weekend trips, nest eggs, even full nights of sleep--to nurture the otherwise wild nature of the said child. Some children refuse to follow sleep schedules until they're way past their toddler years. Some never get "on schedule" well into young adulthood.
Parents, as teachers, can never escape the imperfections of their pupils. They teach and teach until they die, and they hope to God that their children apply half of what was taught during the full span of their parenting lives.
You should NEVER expect to lay down your life on the classroom floor (and if you're doing that you need a break immediately), but you should expect the typical teacher challenges that our predecessors have enjoyed (or endured, lol), a list that includes: isolation, mockery, antagonism, defamation, lynch mobs (factions), dropouts, groundless evaluations (and inept evaluators), confrontations with the public, questioning from the students and more.I wonder how many times one of Plato's students left the group and decided to train for a sport instead.
The bottom line is that the problems of teaching have not changed much. In fact, our position throughout the ages has bettered a little, since no one can hang you for heresy if you invite your students to question certain philosophies and ideas.
What has changed most is our access to resources. Plato could not recount for us--up to the minute--the number of people who left his seminars, the variance in attendance per person, the topics most listeners enjoyed and returned to further explore. He left us no best practice videos. He could not share with us the particulars of brain-based education. He could provide for us no up-to-date management methods for the head-of-household teenagers of his century. In short, information is giving us a leg up if we use it properly.
What we must do as teachers, then, is make time to teach ourselves. Most teacher education programs DO NOT prepare teachers for the high and low tides of the classroom, and in four years they cannot. There are some things you must learn on-the-job with the population you serve. So, if you want staying power, you have to become a student again.
BEFORE YOU LEAVE, look at yourself carefully like you would look at a student who came to you
for help. Ask yourself:
- What are you doing with your free time?
- Are you getting enough sleep?
- Do you eat wholesome meals?
- Have you cultivated a healthy relationship with your parents?
- Are you following healthy friendship/dating relationship standards?
- Are you controlled by your television schedule?
- Are you goal-focused and driven?
- Have you thought about how your present actions will affect your future?
Think of all the things we ask kids that we don't even ask ourselves! How much time did YOU spend studying last week's lesson? And WHY ARE YOU teaching it? And WHY DID YOU teach it that way? And do you REALLY care if the kids learned it?
I'm a teacher, and I'm not here to beat you down. I want to lift you up and shake you out a little. If you chose this field knowing its challenges, you are a VIP. Before you leave, think about whether you've given this thing your best and cleverest efforts.
If you haven't, you'll be miserable anywhere else. Picture Ghandi locked up behind a cubicle wearing a VOIP headset. I can't imagine he would have been happier there than he was teaching non-violence through what we all know was real-time, very public suffering.
Happy Teaching (or Not),
-Ms. Moss
