Day Four: What do you love about teaching?

I love my students. I told my kids a couple days ago that I've never met a stupid student and they all looked at me like I was crazy (and a few of them began to say "even..."). That's when we discussed the idea Ron Ritchart discusses in Intellectual Character, that "intellectual character... basically has to do not with how smart people are but how they invest their intelligence, with what commitment to imagination, evidence, inquiry, fairness, and the like." If those students who make poor choices would put in a fraction of the effort they put into being the class clown into their schoolwork they would pass everything easily; it's just an issue of where they choose to invest their intelligence.

Watching my students understand that concept (and others like it) is really fun. And the conversations we can have when they do finally "get it" are even more rewarding. I love it when a student comes up to me and says "I'm writing an essay for fun about The Fault in our Stars, will you read it when I'm done?" And when that same student says they're just writing it "for fun" I can see how they are applying their learning from my class to their interests and I do my best to not scare them with my excitement. Isn't that transfer of knowledge and competence what we hope for? It doesn't happen as often as I would like it to - but when it does I LOVE my job.

One last thing I love (because there are so many things I love about it, but I'm going to limit myself here) is how creative I am allowed to be as a teacher. No two lessons are the same. I teach three sections of the same class, and for each class it has to be different in some way. I have a set of standards I need to teach - and even a set of texts that I'm limited to by the selections in my school (or Project Gutenberg not that they have their iPads) - but each class takes those texts a different way. Each of those classes will have completely different conversations. Even if I were to teach this class for the next ten years, three sections each year, there is no way I could limit myself to teach any of them in the same way - or expect the same papers or even give them the exact same prompts or questions (after all, we need to respond to current events and keep our curriculum relevant). I love that teaching is an art. It is not a calculation, it is not a perfect science, it is constantly moving, shifting, growing, adapting, reacting: and educators move with each of those swiftly swinging strokes with a shocking amount of agility.

I lied - I have to write one more thing I love about teaching: the teachers. We're a fun group of people.