The Highest and Lowest Points in Teaching

This essay was submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements in one of my education courses back in college. I felt a need of documenting how my beliefs are changing. And ideologically, I am going strong. Still, it's nice to look at my essays during these times. It feels so naive yet idealistic at the same time.

Some teachers say that they find joy in teaching. Honestly, I believe them in a sense. There is always a sense of fulfillment whenever students learn. Yes, I feel that temporarily, but just to be true to myself, I didn’t have a highest moment in student teaching though I have a lowest.

Teaching is a noble profession?

Call me insensitive, I don’t care. I think that being happy about the performance of the students is something that should be reflected about. Why are we happy with it? Is it because the lesson plan went exactly as we want it to be? Is it because the students are behaved? These are, indeed, factors to be considered, but we should think that when the lesson plan is followed and ALL of the students behaved exactly as we wanted them to be, then we have a problem. The problem is that we make them conform, and conformity is against my very philosophy that I must respect my students’ individual differences. I made them all follow me and I turned them into unthinking robots for a period. Do this, do that. Therefore, I didn’t made them think freely, I didn’t make them make their own meaning. I am just happy with my teaching whenever I sense that they grasped the lesson in different ways. I don’t want to get a high moment from teaching, because I didn’t take Education to make hordes of students make me happy. I teach you; make me happy. That I think is not a good attitude. Teaching did not dawn to humanity to inflate teachers’ egos.

But I'm sure as hell don't want to look too stressed about it...

I also didn’t have a lowest moment in teaching itself, because this would truly affect the atmosphere inside the classroom. I don’t want to enter the classroom depressed and in turn, depressing my students. But I did have a lowest moment in my relationship with the other teachers in school. I like my opinions being questioned, but I don’t like my ideas being blocked, especially if the topic that I’m talking about would surely affect the students like RH Bill. One teacher did it, and I was seething in disguised annoyance. This is only one of the many examples in which schools sometimes kill the positive energy that young teachers bring. If we are so serious in educating our students and making them think, then the school must be an institution of the exchange of ideas not just between students but also between the teachers themselves. The teachers must be the ones who must start a healthy intellectual discourse about pressing issues that will surely have its effect in education. This brings me to my philosophy that teachers themselves must be free to think. If teachers smother each other to prevent them from thinking, then they would do the same to the students. They would just stunt the minds of the students and turn them into a mindless horde.

Some teachers say that they find joy in teaching. Yes, I believe them, as there is always a sense of fulfillment whenever students learn. I am yet to have that highest moment, but I’m not bracing myself, because these same teachers didn’t tell us if schools are havens for thinking, anyway.