Ze passion, it iz gone...

When you were little, did you ever imagine yourself as a doctor? How about a lawyer? An astronaut? A pro athlete? Why did you imagine yourself as those things? When I was about five years old, I told my mother that I wanted to be a mitten maker. In my five-year-old head, cutting out mitten shapes from pieces of paper and taping them together (come on, I was five! Do you really my mother would have even let me near knitting needles to make real mittens?) seemed like a the perfect career for me. After all, I loved making paper mittens, and shouldn’t your job be something that you love to do, in an area of study about which you love to learn?

Flash forward eighteen years. I have both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree under my belt in areas not even remotely related to making mittens, and I teach at a learning center. I ask a class of sixth graders to discuss their future goals with me, and the responses I receive are more than a bit startling.

“I want to be a doctor because my parents told me it’s the only respectable job there is.”

“I want to go into science because that’s what all of my friends are doing.”

“I want to someday go to a school in the Ivy League because that’s what my parents say that my friend’s parents are making him do. I’m smarter than him, so if he can do it, I can do it.”

“I want to be an engineer because I want to show people that I’m smart enough to be successful.”

Excuse me, what? Why are these students’ career goals so strongly influenced by parent and peer pressure? Initially, I figured that maybe some of these answers came about by the fact that these kids are probably a little too young to have thought much about their career goals. Instead of actually thinking about what they wanted to do, they settled for the jobs that either their parents had or that their parents were perhaps encouraging them to do. Then, however, I made a very startling connection.

I have many friends from high school and college who are currently in either medical school, law school, or another doctorate program. The rigor of these programs is brutal, and it takes a certain strong work ethic and self discipline to get through them. Certainly, I once assumed, any person who opts to enroll in such a program must be very passionate about what he is doing. Upon talking to many of my friends in these programs, however, I’m noticing a very scary trend.

“I don’t want to do this. My parents pushed me into it.”

“I’m not really interested in this; I’m just doing it so my friends, peers, and family will view me as successful.”

“I want to live in a big house some day, so I’m going to get through this program.”

Okay, really? You are in these programs that eat up years of your life so that you can impress others? So you can create a certain "image" for yourself that may not be true to who you really are? So that you can live in a big house? Why do these responses, given to me by people with about thirteen more years of life experience, so closely parallel those given to me by the sixth graders?

What happened to learning for the sake of learning? To going outside and asking questions about why the leaves are changing color, just to satisfy your curiosity? To asking your father where the sun goes at night time because you want to understand why the world turns so dark? To figuring out why the tiny snowman you brought in the house a few minutes ago is now a puddle of water? What happened to being a doctor or a lawyer so you can help people? Why not be an engineer for the love of creating and operating things? Where's the heart in your job? Why are students – who eventually become adults with a similar mindset – so greatly motivated by pressure from others or the desire to show other people up that they forget that learning can be enjoyable? Most importantly for me, what can I do as a teacher to bring a passion for learning, the acquisition of knowledge for the sake of simply understanding more about our world, back into my classroom?

Through the Eyes of the Tiny

First of all, this is my first education-related blog post since before my student teaching experience began. I recently reread this blog of mine and realized how much I miss sharing my ridiculous thoughts and opinions about education-related topics with others who can relate. I also miss creating cartoons to entertain the masses. Now that I’ve had one year of student teaching, several months of co-teaching at a privately-owned learning center, and a couple months of substitute teaching under my belt, I think now would be as good of a time as any to return to the edublogging world because there is just so much that can be discussed with regards to teaching.

The Issue at Hand
Today, I’d like to discuss a pet peeve of mine that has made a surprisingly large impact on how I am perceived in the professional world: my size. I have always been a very short, thin, light-weight person – it’s genetic. For years, those who don’t know me – and even many people who do – have been mistaking me for somebody much younger in age. When I was a child, their guesses were only mildly off.

But as time progressed, this problem got worse and worse.

One of my biggest pet peeves is people telling me that when I’m older, I’ll appreciate looking younger. As of right now, how I’m going to feel about this situation in the future does not matter to me – I have to learn how to deal with all the problems it’s causing me now because something tells me these problems are going to impact my professional life for a while.

Now, when I was growing up and going through school, I was always on the smaller side of my classmates. With the exception of middle school, when I had a sudden, six-inch growth spurt and was actually taller than most of my classmates for a couple years, I’ve always had to look way up to talk to most people my age. This was never something that bothered me, and nobody treated me any differently because I was a little bit shorter than most, so it’s not something I often thought about; therefore, I was not prepared for the enormous impact my size would have on my professional life.

So how, specifically, has my size affected my teaching experiences so far? Let’s just put it this way: while I was at my student teaching placement last year, I was mistaken for a student at least once a day. Yes, and these mistakes lasted the entire school year. Even in May, teachers would confront me about why I was parking in the teacher lot. The vice principal yelled at me for taking food out of the cafeteria, insisting that students were not permitted to do that. The cafeteria lady was hesitant to let me cut in line because she wasn’t convinced that I was actually a student teacher (the school at which I did my student teaching did not issue IDs to student teachers, so there was really no way of proving that I was.) The librarian would ask me where my pass was every time I entered the library. I would often hear students in the hallway whispering about me when I walked by, thinking I didn’t hear them, and talking about how tiny I am and how they thought I was a student. Although my year of student teaching was an overall positive experience in my professional growth, these particular episodes made me realize that if I wanted to be a high school teacher, there would be so many complications.

But it didn’t stop there. Every time I am called to be a substitute in a high school class, there are always a few kids who give me strange looks when they first walk in. I’ve had a few ask me whether or not I was a student. I’m always thankful when I see one of the kids I taught last year walk in any room I am the sub for because then at least one person in that class knows better!

The first time I ever did a substitute teaching job, I was assigned to an art class at the school at which I student taught last year. When the ladies in the office saw me trying to pick up a sub folder, one of them asked me, “Weren’t you a student here last year?”

AHHHHHHHHHHH!!

An Unlikely Solution

The best part about substitute teaching is that you can be called to teach any subject area at any type of public school in the districts that you choose. It was just recently that I was called to sub at a place that was familiar to me, but a place to which I never thought I would willingly return, a place of locker jams and lip gloss…a place of awkward height differences and changing voices…a place where “dances” consist of the boys standing on one side of the room and the girls standing on the other…a place where most people can claim that they spent the most awkward years of their lives…MIDDLE SCHOOL!!!

If I could go back in time and tell my middle school self that in the future, I would be thankful to go back there, my middle school self would most definitely question my sanity. She would probably ask me what would make me so inclined to return to middle school after earning a Master’s degree from a topnotch institution. I would like to think that perhaps my middle school self would be smart enough to put two and two together to figure out that my 23-year-old self is a teacher, but it’s been so long that I forgot exactly how strong my logical thinking skills were in middle school.

Anyway, middle schoolers. Interacting with them is entirely different from interacting with high schoolers. For one, I actually look like an adult compared to them. Because of this, I have noticed that when I sub for middle school classes, the students tend to treat me with more respect (ie: they quiet down when I ask them, they follow my directions, they are more likely to follow the usual classroom rules and not try to trick me into doing things their normal teacher would not let them do.)

I remember being in middle school and viewing many of my classmates as self-centered, outspoken brats. While I doubt that a whole lot has changed there, from the perspective of the students, as a teacher, I do notice a certain intimidation that middle schoolers have around authority figures that seems to wear off by the time they hit high school. It really makes my job a lot easier. There are definitely advantages and disadvantages to teaching the middle and high school age groups, but now that I am aware of the enormous difference in my teaching experiences based upon something as mundane as my physical size, I am leaning more towards applying to jobs at middle schools…at least until I am old enough for people to mistake me for a college student!

Now I extend my hand to the education community by posing this question: What were some challenges you faced when you started teaching that you did not foresee prior to the experience?