A new semester is finally about to begin. Again, I will be teaching college political science and interpersonal communication, two separate disciplines, but two fields I am qualified to teach). Strangely enough, the two disciplines really aren’t that different from each other.
While I’m looking forward to a new semester of new young (and some older) minds to educate, I’m also feeling a bit apprehensive, and it’s mainly because our country is so negative towards teachers that I’m tempted to tell America to go screw itself and stop educating anyone on anything. The money isn’t all that great, so that’s not the only reason anyone would ever teach. But whenever I read about some critic of education going all half cocked about how teachers are lazy, how they only work a short period of time and get great pay (which they rarely do), and all sorts of other insults, I want to just say screw it. It’s not worth it. If America sees education as less important than business than let’s let the market figure it all out (which to make a long story short, the market is completely incapable of handling altruistic disciplines, like education, because there is no profit in doing the right thing to make your country benefit in the long run). Altruism, which is quite often the only reason to teach, is very difficult to maintain, especially when society goes out of its way to ridicule your field and everyone who has ever gone to school is convinced he or she is an expert on teaching, even though they have absolutely no experience at teaching, or so little that they have nothing solid to contribute.
When I first started teaching years ago, I remember being bogged down by the fact that I was overly concerned that a few of my students were struggling and no one else seemed to care. Other colleagues would tell me they were lazy, so forget about them, but I didn’t feel that way, and by getting closer to them, I discovered that there was more going on with their personal lives that was actually interfering with their learning. I realized then and there that they were going to fail because everyone else gave up on them because it was too much work to care, not because it was the right or wrong thing to do. What I discovered then and there is that educators who care are quickly discouraged from caring and working harder, quite often by the system, and sometimes by the same people they educate. Yet, I was convinced that this was important to overcome, or our very reason for teaching was gone.
Years later, I found myself in the same situation with a few students just last semester. It was so difficult to try to be more available than the system allowed, yet I tried, and in the end all you get is sometimes a belated thank you from someone who may or may not have saw you as their ally rather than the person who was making their education “more difficult” by forcing them to jump through hoops no one forced them to do so in the past. A couple of students out of the blue contacted me and thanked me, which may not have been the reward that completely paid back the efforts, but it helped, and that sort of thing is the item that keeps a teacher going. However, when attacked by so many other who really don’t care and see you as the enemy (for bizarre reasons that make no logical sense), it becomes less and less likely that you’ll continue trying.
So, I go into a new semester, thinking that maybe this will be the time when I find that one struggling student who needs that certain nudge forward, and hopefully I won’t be discouraged, rejected and forsaken at the time that one person needs a little more from an educator who is doing everything possible just to make sure the trains run on time (for the sake of an Italian historical reference of competent leadership).
When you’re standing up in front of a class of students and explaining the virtues of the governmental system, as proposed by Adams and Madison, you have to bite your lip after that young student in the back row raises her hand and asks: “Do we have to know that for the test?” I remember once responding to that exact question with a ten minute lecture on the importance of knowing information, history and relevance to all sorts of connective synapses of knowledge. How Caesar understood that Alexander’s charge into India incorporated phalanx technology with the scattering of forces or how Patton understood that Caesar’s understanding of Alexander showed him how a faster tank can be stopped by a barrage of spread ammunition. To them, nuance was more important than specific knowledge, but they came to specific knowledge through understanding of nuance. Even when explaining such things, you’ll still have one student sitting there wondering, “is this going to be on the test?”
Unfortunately, teaching can be a lot like that.