Being A Teacher

Anybody out there wants to be a teacher? If so, you need to watch this short video first. The United States have 3.2 million public school teachers. Within the next 8 years, 2.8 million more are needed. But who's going to take up a job that, by all accounts, is badly-paid, tiring, and leaves you with an everyday sense of "I could have done more, but I didn't" ?

I was a teacher in the local system for exactly fifteen years, from March 1993 to March this year. It ended with accusations that I was a bad teacher, termination of contract, and severance pay. I'll leave it to my students to decide if that was true. But I can honestly say that I enjoyed teaching, I enjoyed being a teacher, and I felt that I was a good one and was doing a valuable job. Given another time around in some alternate reality, I'd probably want to do everything I did again, but better.

And to those of you out there who still want to be a teacher, I can only tell you what I told a class of graduating teachers in 1995, when the system still thought of me as a good teacher. There are five things you need to think about, as a teacher:

1. Students — the people you serve; at the very least, know them by face, if not by name; read about their backgrounds, absorb information from their behaviour and speech; use whatever you can for the students’ growth.
   
2. Subject — what you teach; you should always know why you teach it, why it should be studied, and what it is all about; keep up with the latest, expand the scope and depth of your knowledge.
   
3. Society — your role; dealing with what society, in the form of parents and the public (and the local educational authority), expects teachers to do.
   
4. Staff — your colleagues; understand the school culture, and what the school expects of you; pay attention to the interactions in the staff-room and how they can help or hinder you; politics is a bummer but it is also a reality.
   
5. Self — who you are; know what you stand for and why; know what real abilities and skills you have; reflect on your performance often.

In various situations, these five things will change in priority, but they are all important. You must never forget your students, you should keep a handle on your subject, you have to continue to be hopeful about society, you need to work with other staff, and you must not lose your sense of self.

Always remain true to your mission statement. If you have to change it, change it only after thinking about it for a long time. It cannot be something you do lightly, either when crafting that statement or re-crafting it. It took me a very intense two days at a retreat to craft mine, and since then I have not changed it. Again, I'll leave it for my students to decide if I lived by it.

Lastly, whatever happens, you will always be a teacher. When you walk out of your last classroom and your last school, the habits of mind you developed will stay. You will catch yourself being didactic, pedagogical, cognitively aware, and liable to provoke cognitive dissonance. Still want to be a teacher?