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I Can’t Believe They Pay Me To Do This

The second best thing about teaching is they give you money to do it. The best thing is you get to hang out in a classroom with a bunch of kids.

The classroom is where eager eyes look up at you saying, "What do we do next?" Children love to do. Learning, for them, is a by-produce of doing. The curriculum is just a game that is being played on the way to discovery. Oh sure, there are planned outcomes, and kids have to score well at testing time, but the really important stuff happens at odd moments, when you least expect it.

The classroom is a giant stew pot, and when things are cooking, everything that happens can be a learning moment. The magic of the classroom is you never know who is going to learn what when you start out. Learning moments can be pure joy. Children will literally celebrate for each other when they see the light go on in one of their classmates. Often it is the teacher who is the one who learns. It is an empowering experience for a kid to see that he or she has shown the teacher something.

Hurts, emotions, and frustrations in the classroom happen for all to see. Working through traumas, settling conflicts, telling sides, and making up are often public affairs. The classroom is not a talk show. It is the real thing. You cannot break for commercial or tape to view later. Problems and troubles must be dealt with as they occur. These situations are not what get in the way of teaching; they are a large part of what teaching really is.

Kids love to come into the room early and talk about their lives with each other or with the teacher. They will decorate, put up work, and bring in objects to personalize the class. A room develops its own character over the course of the year. A classroom is a clubhouse, a laboratory, a lobby, a theater, and an art gallery, and….I think you get the idea.

At the end of the school year we are required to disassemble our rooms and remove every bit of evidence that anyone was ever there. There is nothing left but the desks and tables. It is melancholy and a bit spooky to stand there in the bare room like I did again this year, knowing you have just officially sent the whole year, and everything that happened, forever into the past.

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...they should be so lucky.

unless...

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