Teaching as A Forced March -- Should be a Dance to Your Own Beat

It has taken me long enough to get to this point in my life:

I do not like being a teacher. I hate the job, frankly. Well, I cannot be so conclusively cynical. Teaching depends as much on the audience as the one teaching. I have found that teaching in a public school is an unrewarding exercise in futility. Students deserve better, teachers deserve way better, and the taxpayer -- he deserves his money back.

I am worried, however, about what I am supposed to do, then.

In one sense, the world is open to me. I have so many things that I could do, if I wanted to.

On the other hand, I have no idea what I want to do. I have never really thought about the matter.

One thing is for sure. Teaching is just not my bag. I desire so much more, and I deserve so much better. The sooner that every person can arrive at this understanding, the better for everyone. We do not serve each other if we just play small and play along because we are afraid to get into the greater game of life, and that more abundantly.

I cannot say that I have had a miserable time the whole time that I tried to make the most of my career in public education. However, the fact that I could not stay in one site for more than one year says a lot, yet what it declared so obviously to me did not get through until I realized that I would never really have a chance at succeeding in doing what I really wanted to do.

Teaching can be a forced march for everyone involved. That is not the way that learning should be, however. Learning is innate and intense, if you are willing to go with the flow within you. Sadly, school districts are intent on making money and getting test scores up in order to justify their placement. They want to convince the local community share-holders that they deserve more of our tax dollars.

Teaching is about finding the rhythm for every kid, for every adult, and each of us does march to the beat of a different drummer. Teaching must be a free exercise of one's time and resources. There is no sense, moral or otherwise, in pushing people into classrooms when they simply do not want to be there. I understand why so many students harass their teachers. They need to do something to shake up and break up the monotony of teaching.

One instructor told me that a classroom can run like a symphony orchestra or a jazz band. In the former example, the teacher is conductor, leading every student through every role and reason that they are required to fulfill. The power, the role, the focus is on the teacher. In a jazz-band type of class, every student knows what to do, and they know that they know. The classroom runs as a self-contained community, in which every student knows their role and fulfills it for the common good. Like a well-trained and well-tune improv, student and teacher make the most of their freedom without hurting or impeding others, The world runs like that, if people let it.

The more freedom the better, the more the students can be themselves without being abusive or disruptive. Students can learn without getting burned by peers.

For the majority of classrooms in Los Angeles, though, students have become so accustomed to getting by doing little, that a teacher is hard-pressed to motivate students to participate. For student, teacher, and administrator, the music of learning has turned into a dirge that everyone is forced to march to, and no one is getting into the gloomy groove.