Teaching: UPS and DOWNS

Music: Kevin Mileski, "Through the Window"

I think that one of the interesting things about teaching is the "emotional roller coaster" piece. For people who work with people, this is nothing new. When you work with people, for your job, and not "widgets" you learn, pretty quickly, that people are complicated, inconsistent, sometimes neurotic, often exhilerating...the list goes on. I would be curious to talk to other teachers about how they "turn off" (or fail to turn off) the things that happen in class after the class is over.

I was reading over one students' transcript from her interview with a teacher recently and as I was reading, I kept thinking to myself how "down and out" the professor she was interviewing sounded. He kept going on and on about students needing to take responsibility for their educations and how so many students are unaware of how much their education is costing or how they fail to connect the price of the education with their day-to-day performance with school work...I read over this transcript and all I could think was, "Wow, I've been there before. That guy just had a bad day/class/afternoon-reading-papers and he's feeling terrible." I couldn't help feel bad for the student who was interviewing him. She knocked on his door to interview the guy and she had no idea what an earful she was going to get! There have been times I've felt the way that guy felt. I wouldn't have wanted to have some student come along and interview me at moments like that. I would have just wanted to tell all the students to please go away and leave me alone.

But then, like the guy in the interview, you remind yourself of the good times as well. Teachers, I think, are resilient and damningly optimistic. When they reach their lowest moments, they somehow are able to not forget or to remind themselves of the good moments, too. Maybe this is not unique to teachers, maybe we all do this. I don't know. One minute we're cursing students. The next moment, we're reminding ourselves of those one or two students from that one class who always impress us and whose writing we look forward to reading each time an assignment comes due and who we look forward to hearign from during class discussions. We're buoyed up by these people. Sometimes there are only a few of them, but it only takes one, I think.

I don't know where I'm going with all this. The ups and downs. Working with human beings, you have to sort of expect that you're going to have the ups and the downs. And in a classroom of 27 people, and four classes a day, there are A LOT of ups and downs there. I'm always struck by how powerfully I feel the ups and downs. There have been times I've driven away from a school where I am working on a total high, feeling as though I accomplished everything I wanted to accomplish and MORE that day. Then there are days I drive away, banging my head on the steering wheel because I feel as though something that was important to me was just not happening. The good times, you drive away and think--my God, I am doing the thing on earth that I was put here to do. The bad times, you go over and over in your head, sort of like if you have a fight with someone...you keep going over what you SHOULD have said or what you SHOULD have done differently. It is very much like that, in fact. But, you can't go back and re-do it. It's over and you sort of have to move on. Or maybe not. I don't know.

One thing for sure: I work really hard to try to remember what it was like to be a student and to give students the benefit-of-the-doubt. One thing I've noticed in the past few years is that, as people get older, they really do gravitate towards these sort of generalizations about "kids these days" or "students these days" and how things are different today than when they were younger. A very good friend of mine from college did this just the other day. I was a bit taken aback. I'm at that stage of life when people are just beginning to forget about what it was like to be young. This allows them to make generalizations about young people. They begin to romanticize their pasts--things were different when we were young. We had more...respect, courtesy, common sense...you name it.

I think it's a bunch of bull and incredibly unfair. Sure, things change. But not everything changes. The big things don't change all that much. It grates on me to no end to hear people my age and older talking about how they worked harder than young people today or cared more or were more courteous or whatever. It's no wonder young people come to resent older people. They feel as though they are being judged. It's one of the things I've committed myself to: arguing back when people my age start making sweeping generalizations about young people and what's wrong with them. I really don't think that much has changed since I was young. I really do believe that young people have good intentions, but are as likely to be lazy, stupid, loving, responsible (or irresponsible), hard-working or courteous as anyone else.

I'll get off my soapbox now. More posts to come soon...