Name Six: Lessons as a Teacher

From Seth to Rick:
Name six things you learned as a teacher.

*Rick teaches Math at the high school across town from the school he and Seth attended.

There's a ton of sappy educational crap I could say along the lines of, "The kids have taught me so much more...blah blah blah," but instead here are six things I really learned as a teacher- or at the very least, relearned on the other side of the desk:

1. Nobody cares about the content. Not the students, not the parents, not the administrators, not the bureaucrats, and frankly, not the teachers, either. And that's fine, because the last thing that determines how successful you'll be in life is whether or not you understood the purpose of the Spanish-American War.

2. Two types of people become teachers: the ones who had a great time in school and want to keep enjoying that experience, and those who had a miserable experience and need vengeance. We all know exactly which ones are which.

3. Characteristics come in waves. One year may be a wave of work ethic, followed by a year of competitive need, followed by a year of pure talent. My guess as to why this happens is because in this small town, students have been with each other for a decade by the time they get to me in the high school. Day by day, those personality traits have worn onto each other.

4. Everyone in the nation has strong opinions of what school is and what it should be, because everyone has twelve plus years of experience with it. You can't casually mention that you're a teacher anywhere without the response being a discussion of the other person's experience. I think this is especially true for math.

5. Nobody knows what they are doing. To begin with, all educational research is flawed. In order for it to eliminate cultural factors, it needs to be done in one location and stretched over multiple years longitudinally. If you stretch the research out over multiple years, though, by the time it is published, it is no longer relevant. Things change at lightning speed now. Five years ago-which is not that long ago- only my rich students had their own cell phones and half the kids listened to music on portable cd players. Now every kid has a cell phone and half of them can watch a full-length movie on it. A while back, I asked a First grade teacher how you teach kids to read. Apparently, even though everybody has their own technique, nobody has any idea how kids acquire that skill. They just see other people do it long enough and it happens.

6. You are always a teacher. This probably has more to do with being in a small town, but I cannot go anywhere without running into current or former students. For a couple years, bars were safe, but I taught long enough that plenty of my Former students are of age now. They all know your name- including lots of students that didn't have you, but knew someone who did- and they all react the same way I did when I saw teachers outside of school- confusion followed by overfamiliarity. Some days it's nice, but other days you just need a break.

Readers: what did you not realize about your job until you started doing it?