Why Would Anyone Want To Teach?

Making A Difference.

You will make a difference in people’s lives.

Imagine waking up and not having the skills you learned in school.

· You pick up your phone, intending to read your e-mails. You can’t understand the words.

· You go to your job as an engineer. There’s a meeting today about the bridge you’ve been helping to design. You no longer understand what your colleagues are talking about, and you have nothing to contribute to the conversation.

· You go shopping but you can’t compare prices or estimate how much you’re spending.

· You have to order food for your restaurant, but you can’t figure out how much to order.

No matter where life takes us, we need the basic skills we learned and practiced in school. While reading, writing, and arithmetic are the most obvious skills we need on a daily basis, we also gained other kinds of basic knowledge. If we can interpret the weather report, understand how the government is structured, read music, use the vocabulary needed to communicate within our professions- that’s because our teachers gave us those tools.

It is our education that brings us choices. Doctor, production manager, florist, chef, police officer, archaeologist, graphic designer, news reporter? With a basic education, you can move ahead to specialize in any area you wish. As a teacher, you have the chance to give these choices to your students. It has been said that teaching is the profession that makes all the other professions. As a teacher, you give choices, chances, and futures to the hundreds that will come your way as students.

Students aren't the only ones who get educated.

The best way to learn is to teach someone else. When I was a kid, I was not a math star. More likely, I was the kid who took the test three times until I finally caught on. Long division was my nemesis. I spent long evenings at the kitchen table trying to figure out what to multiply 23 by to get it close to 156. This, I might add, was long before calculators made their appearance in the classroom. I despised division and did just enough work to get by. Maybe. I had no real understanding of what I was doing and was extremely thankful when we moved on to fractions, until I realized I had even less of an idea of what those were about. Once I had access to a calculator in middle school and high school, I was able to hold my own.

Fast forward to age 24. I am a substitute teacher charged with teaching fourth graders for the day. I arrive in the classroom and sit at the teacher’s desk. The morning sun is streaming across his open plan book. We will start the day with math and we are beginning the chapter on long division. My stomach lurches and I am sweating. I open the textbook and turn to the prescribed page. I grab some paper and a pencil and hunch over the lesson. I carefully read the instructions and work out the sample problems. I start on the practice problems. Half an hour goes by and it’s almost time for the students to enter. More importantly, in my urgent quest to learn this monstrosity, I use my reading skills, memory of the procedures, and sheer determination to finally figure out how to do long division. The kids come in, and the math lesson begins. I have successfully learned well enough to teach.

As a teacher, we often have to expand our collection of knowledge and acquire new skills. It’s one of the challenges and one of the perks of the job.

As I progressed in my career and found myself teaching a gamut of subjects, I realized something odd. I could always read and write as easily as I could breathe. However, I struggled in math and had a scant understanding of science as a student. As a teacher, language arts frustrated me. How do they not get this? But I did well in teaching math and science. I understood instinctively what the kids might not understand before I even introduced a skill or topic. My weaknesses as a student became my strengths as a teacher.

As a teacher, I had the privilege of giving to students, but I also improved my own skills and knowledge. Teaching is difficult, sometimes bordering on impossible. There is no glossing over the serious issues in schools. But there is good also. The challenge is to find the good.

Author of Who's Tougher Than Us? The Realities of Teaching. Check it out on Amazon go to my website, donnagerard.com.