High school teachers: a source of inspiration

JUST A GUESS: you probably spent some time sitting in class this week. You were probably bored past tears and right to the brink of delirium just when you went back to tears again.

Some guy in the back is struggling to understand what the class means and why anyone will ever need to know what you’re going to learn.

Hopefully, he’s not your professor.

One of my current joys right now is the prospect of inspiring numbing apathy in students.

God willing, I am going to be a high school teacher. Hopefully, I’ll be one who actually prepares the students for the magic of higher education.

After all, the practical benefits to secondary-level teaching are substantial. Plenty of benefits and scholarship opportunities make it a no-brainer.

The kicker is that I think I’m going to enjoy it, so teaching couldn’t get much better for me without a six-figure salary. I don’t think I’ll hold my breath.

But I never would have considered the education profession without some mentor figure. I was somewhat lucky, too, in that no fewer than two teachers inspired me to take up the mantle.

One inspired me in a very good way. The other inspired me despite herself.

The first had a rational, real philosophy about his advanced placement calculus class. Pun intended; he had that sense of humor. His classes were focused and interesting, punctuated with rants about the Iraq War and the Bush administration. Except for the focused and interesting part, it really prepared me for college.

The first half of each class session was lecture, and the second half was doing homework based on that lecture, with help available, if you needed it. There would be a test every two or three weeks, and one project a semester.

I knew exactly what to expect. We didn’t have a single frivolous hands-on learning experience that was meant to protect students from stumbling over any actual learning by accident.

Normal high school classrooms shouldn’t need crayons or markers, and this one didn’t.

It was in sharp contrast to the senior AP English class that same year, taught by the second inspiring teacher of mine.

Ineffectual and uninspiring, I could compare its value to a shiny rock with pretty colors on it.
Unfavorably.

Should any English class spend two weeks of block schedule watching the six-hour BBC production of Pride and Prejudice in the weeks before the AP test?

Should supposed advanced placement classes have whole months without assigned homework reading?

If people in our class passed the test as I barely did, it was on our own merit.

Between the two teachers, the first —the good one — is what I’d like to be for my students, while the second teacher — the one we colored in “The Knight’s Tale” for — is my anathema, all that is unholy and appalling in the modern classroom.

If we want high school classes to prepare students for college, they can’t operate on the same level as Ms. Wilson’s third grade explorers.

The high school diploma should represent more than the school’s confidence in a student’s ability to convert oxygen into carbon monoxide for four years straight.

Why do I care? Lowered high school standards make lowered college standards.

If you’re really that bored and uninterested in your classes, don’t blame the guy behind you in the back of the class who’s picking his nose right now.

Blame his high school’s teaching disability. That’s actually more depressing.

Comment on this story in the Opinion forum >>