I saw this at Riley Dog today (I repost it on the unlikely chance that people reading this site don’t already read RD).
It was written by Taylor Mali.
What Teachers Make, or
You can always go to law school if things don’t work out
He says the problem with teachers is, “What’s a kid going to learn
from someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher?”
He reminds the other dinner guests that it’s true what they say about
teachers:
Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.
I decide to bite my tongue instead of his
and resist the temptation to remind the dinner guests
that it’s also true what they say about lawyers.
Because we’re eating, after all, and this is polite company.
“I mean, you
I wish more teachers were like that.
But not like the gym teacher I had in junior high who stood by and laughed while some punk beat on me in the middle of a crowded corridor because I was a little defenseless nerd. He didn’t make much difference.
Or the elementary school teacher I had who hadn’t prepared a new lesson plan in twenty years and was still giving out mimeographed maps of pre-WWII Europe for geography lessons in 1972.
Or the modern history teacher I had in high school who didn’t know that Mao Tse-tung had been dead for three years.
I don’t blame the writer for responding defensively, and I also had some wonderful teachers, but both sides of that particular spectrum are pretty well represented, I think.
Taylor Mali found at the http://www.defpoetryjam.com/ site
Beautiful stuff. Inspired me to write my own ode to teachers:
http://www.lucky8ball.com/wordsmeanthings/index.cfm?postID=1651
Yeah, Brian, I’ve had all kinds of teachers too. But the good ones did make a difference.
I’d love to be able to look into the future and find out what my third-graders will be saying about me when they think about their teachers. I hope it’ll be something along the lines of kicking their asses every day in order to teach them more than they ever expected to learn.
yeah, i was thinking of you when i reposted that, mary. teachers like you are my heroes.
The local schools have hot (short) pink sheets of paper in the windows of teachers that are being laid off this summer. Almost every window has one, it seems. The Teacher of the Year in San Jose? Getting laid off. But hey, maybe we will eventually get federal assistance for the big electricity sales fraud of last year and then they’ll all get hired back.
In, say, the next presidential administration. Sigh.
That rocks.