Wow! You not only witnessed my triumphant return to my blog, but I am actually doing two blogs in one week!
Astounding.
So several months ago I was bumbling around Youtube and discovered CGPGrey, who does these highly amusing mish mash descriptions of various topics like Coffee and Pennies. CGPGrey led me to Crash Course, which is an amusing/frantic/informative/teen-oriented series of history and science mini-lessons done by two brothers: John Green (the history guy) and Hank Green (the science guy).
Upon further delving I discovered that these two brothers--who live way far apart from each other in the U.S.-- have been doing a video blog together for the past three years.
And upon watching some of these hyper-frantic stream of consciousness vlogs (which are slowly inspiring me to want to do the same but I'm pretty sure I'm not nearly as frantic or entertaining as John and Hank), I discovered that John Green is an author of young adult novels. So I ordered his newest novel "The Fault in Our Stars" and plopped it into our kindle icloud reader (I adore Kindle. Ebooks are saving my sanity. Living in Japan no longer means reading the same 6 books 2000 times).
And I must say the book rocked. I read it twice.
At any rate, I was eating potatoes and eggs this morning and watching one of John and Hank's many video blogs wherein John plugged the question "Why does my" into the "Google Auto Fill" window and then tried to answer the questions that came up.
So I was inspired to fire up Google and try it for myself. Now, I am fully aware that Google just spits out the top searches. And I know that this means less than nothing in the real world.
Yet knowing this, I admit to being rather flummoxed upon typing in the line
"Teachers are"
wherein Google spat this list back out at me :
Teachers are overpaid
Teachers are stupid
Teachers are underpaid
Teachers are lazy
Teachers are heroes
Teachers are important
Teachers are babysitters
Aha. Seven descriptions of teachers. (there were three more nonsensical sentence fragments in this list, but I elected to omit those because, quite obviously teachers are not quotes. )
Two of them positive. Teachers are heroes and teachers are important.
One a statement of general fact: Teachers are underpaid.
Which leaves four negatives. The big four that periodically get fluttered into the faces of teachers, along with the accusations of short work hours and long carefree summers.
So I plugged in "Education is" and got this:
Education is freedom
Education is the key to success
Education is the great equalizer
Education is not the filling a pail
Education is the most powerful weapon
Education is important
Education is what remains
Education is a right
Allrighty then. Education is recognized by the Googling masses as a good thing.
I continued my quest:
"School is"
School is bad for children
School is boring
School is a waste of time
School is pointless
School is fun
School is for fools
School is cool
School is stupid
"Okay" I said to myself, "So the Googling masses seem to have the opinion that while education is an incredibly important, very desirable thing, teachers and schools...not so much.
How about Homeschooling?
"Homeschooling is"
Homeschooling is bad
Homeschooling is good
Homeschooling is wrong
Homeschooling is a bad idea
Homeschooling is better
Homeschooling is a joke
Homeschooling is child abuse
Homeschooling is stupid
Homeschooling is legal
I could have done this all day.
But I didn't. I stopped because (a) Google is in no way an accurate indicator of anything. It is the quintessential proof of the phrase "Garbage in, garbage out" and (b) I'm getting hungry and want to eat lunch after I finish this posting.
But I did have a thought.
And the thought is this.
While most folks see education as an important, vital, future-altering concept, when it comes down to the actual DOING of it, all the consensus falls away into insults, stereotypes and pouty disagreement. And while I'm using the "garbage in, garbage out" example of Google to illustrate this point, I have found that the real world more or less supports this as well.
And now, as I slide into my twenty first year of being a teacher (gasp), I find myself reflecting upon some personal teaching truths:
To teach, you've got to love the kids and be willing to dedicate as much time and out-of-pocket money as you've got to nurture each kid and light that fire of learning in each child's eyes. This means doing everything from keeping granola bars and juice boxes in a cupboard to feed a hungry child to clearing a store's shelves of marshmallows and toothpicks in order to create a scale model of the Golden Gate Bridge.
You have to think outside the box--and under the box, inside the box, over the box, around the box. Heck, sometimes you have to throw out the box completely and find another container.
You've got to see yourself not as the epitome of your field, but as another learner, just like your students, only a bit farther along on the continuum.
I've found that by sticking to these truths, no matter who I teach, no matter what subject, no matter the country or continent, I have something that no number of Googling minions can touch: my love for what I do, and my self-respect.
Until next time.
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