Teaching: A Waste of Time or an Investment

On page 136 of Milton Chen's Education Nation, he talks about Scotland's creation of an educational intranet.  It has a beautiful quote from John Gage where he says: "The problem with Americans is we think of education as a cost.  But other nations think of it as an investment."

Now, I want to diverge from this quote into something that has been bothering me ever since I began thinking about becoming a teacher.  So many teachers are only teaching for their paycheck.  They are not teaching in order to better their students lives, not just the student's knowledge of reading, writing, and math.

So, in the movie "Freedom Writers," one of the students yells at Erin Gruwell to just work on her babysitting.  And she looks at him incredulously and says "that's all you think this is?"  And he responds with something to the lines of "Well, we ain't learning anything that can help out there in the real world."  But Gruwell being shocked by being told that her students only think that school and teaching is a big babysitting job what speaks to me.

I can't look at my career in education in terms of a babysitting job, and yet I think that some teachers (at least ones who were educated a long time ago) look at education as.  It is just a place where students go during the day to keep them out of trouble.  But I know that it can be so much more, and I will help make it more.  I will combine different things such as math and reading in mechanics (they have to know mathematics to do certain things like measure the length of that the bar is supposed to be, and they have to read some instructions some times.).  But I need to find what they are interested in, and the whole world will then be at their fingertips.

I will do whatever necessary to help put the whole world in their fingertips, even if that means, like Gruwell, getting other jobs to pay for them to have it.  But if one single teacher can help a student with their entire lives, it is totally worth working a bunch of jobs for it.  I want to help these students, I am not my students' babysitter, but their teacher.  And that means I must respect them and accept them for who they are and continually tell them that they are what they choose to be now, not what they have done in the past.