This afternoon, I overheard a librarian admit to a teacher that she had considered going into teaching.
"I like working with kids," she beamed. She was the story-teller for the kids who visited the library on Tuesday evenings and Saturday mornings.
"But I only see them once in a while. As a teacher, I would have to see those students every day. And I would have to put up with five sets of them. I would get tired of it. They are captive to the classroom, they have to come."
I could not agree more. I was in total agreement as she panned out why she never stepped into a classroom.
"It takes a special person who strangely likes that sort of thing," she remarked. She said this with a condescending tone, something which I had grown accustomed to after visiting that library as frequently as I have in the past few years.
Teaching is not for everyone. I used to think that there was something wrong with me because I was not having the success with the profession as other people were. After seven years of trials and many errors, I can certainly say that this job is not for me, and that it is not exclusively because of any fault of mine. Who would want to put up with such rampant disrespect? Who would want to press the majority of the waking day grading the same thing 150 times, only to go through the sluggish mess again?
The librarian also made the telling point -- why would anyone want to stay after school for three or four more hours grading papers and planning lessons which may or may not work, which do not even interest the teacher beyond the level of busy work?
I so appreciate that woman's honesty -- I wish I had asserted the same truths to myself when I had the chance, before I plopped down any money for the empty, waste-of-time teaching credential program.
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