The Last Day of Education Class

My classes for this semester are now complete and my summer vacation has just begun. I am very happy to see this semester end because it seems as it has been much more stressful than others in the past.

Right now, I only have three more classes that I have to take before I start my student teaching. I am looking forward to it because I will be paired up with a well-respected teacher in a subject area and grade level that I very much enjoy.

My last education class of the year was definitely a site to see as our teacher went around the room asking each of us whether we preferred to teach in high school or middle school after studying both throughout the year. Almost everyone in the room other than me wanted to teach in high school.

The most popular answer I heard was because the content in high school was more in depth than it was in middle school.

Another interesting comment that I heard was that they did not go to college for four years to talk about the basic principles of their subject.

A recurring comment that I have heard throughout the year has been, "Kids in middle school have raging hormones and too many emotions for me to teach them."

Lastly, others were upset with their student teaching placements because it was not at the level that they wanted to teach.

I don't know why these comments bothered me but they did. One of the reasons might be because I enjoy teaching middle school. Also it really does not matter to me what level I teach at as long as I get to coach and be involved with the school and community.

Then their was the "raging hormones" issue that always gets brought up. My understanding was that all people have a wide range of emotions that are uncontrollable. We have seen plenty of this from anyone who has competed on American Idol and Deal or No Deal.

I guess the real thing that I was feeling as I left that class was that we are teachers; nothing more, nothing less. Our job is not to impress our students with the wide range of knowledge we gained in college or to load them down with mindless content drivel.

I see our job as a position that should inspire them to seek out that knowledge for themselves and achieve their potential. I think that some of us take our content way too seriously and forget that we are really there for the students.

My feeling is that if a person's sole purpose for entering education is the content then I think that it should be time to find a new career. As we all know, education and teaching is so much more than just scientific theory, equations, and diagramming sentences.