Teaching: Riding with Mixed Gears

During my sophomore year in high school, I owned a mountain bike which I would ride to school and to work. The summer between my sophomore and junior year, I got my first job in the Downtown area of my hometown.

One day, I found that I was struggling to get from point A to point B. The pedals were not pedalling that day. I struggled to get to work. I was late, and the couple I was slated to replace let me know all about it.

I called my father after my shift was over. I told him how hard it had been for more me to pedal to work, and I knew that there was no way for me to get back home. After one quick look at the bike, my Father told me the problem: I had the two gears of the bike, one for the front wheel and the other for the back wheel, so skewed that it was a miracle that I had been able to bike from home to work in the first place.

Teaching is a lot like riding a bike with mixed gears. You want to go forward as fast as possible, get everything done on the lesson plan, reach out to every student along the way. Then there's the back wheel: the students who come in late, who come from broken homes, marred with their own broken character. The administrators also drag down your ascent, laying more demands, more rules, fewer supplies and a drag on your time.

Teaching is full of such conflicting forces. For me within, the constant contradictions took things from bad to worse. I wanted to do things perfectly, and so perfection I demanded from myself and others, including the students. Perfection in the sense of getting where you want to go is a normal desire. Why else ride the bike except because I want to get somewhere.

Perfection of  a sort is a legitimate need, yet if we are looking for this perfection in the world, we are bound to be bitter and disappointed. As a teacher, imperfection is all in a day's work. Lay out the lesson, hope against hope to get from point A to point B. The harder I tried to get the kids through the lesson, the more time it took. I put more effort into it, frustrated and foolish, easily flustered by students who took advantage of my efforts, failing with every footfall.

The perfection that I sought, in myself in the classroom in other people would never be realized. I have found this perfection in Someone far greater. This perfection rests in an acceptance unshakable, and the knowledge that the more we accept people the way they are, the more likely they are to change for the better. Using the carrot moves the beast of burden faster than whipping him. Accepting people as they are encourages them to do better because they know that you will not have a lesser view of who they are, whether they succeed or fail. This acceptance, this righteousness, has made all the difference. Whether fail or succeed, I am winner every day claiming a new prize, receiving a better gift than the goodness which I had earned before.

Teaching is mixed gears for the man who tried to find perfection in an imperfect world. Living is a breeze of a ride when you find that perfection rests inside oneself and works its way out over time, making the most and more of all that lies in one's path.