So pardon me while I ramble

[dragonjournal]

I thought I wanted to teach high school. I thought I wanted to mold young minds.

... I'm beginning to think I don't. After doing two informational interviews with college professors, and thinking about doing a third, I'm beginning to wonder if teaching high school is really what I want to do.

I want to teach. That much I do know. I just don't know who I want to teach. I want to teach English, but I want to teach literature. I want to listen as people tear stories apart and find the little tidbits that make talking about them interesting.

I don't want to teach English mechanics. Which is something I'll have to teach at the high school level.

I don't want to worry about verb tenses or about how to diagram a sentence. I want to read about analyses of texts and to find out if someone has a different view than I do of the literature that we have to read.

I'm talking myself out of teaching high school aren't I?

I just... I'm not good at workplace politics. And a lot of college work, a lot of work period means politics. I'm not good at it. I freeze up or get too loud, or say the wrong thing at the wrong time, and it all comes back to my social phobia and being terrified of people.

I don't know what to do. But I need to decide soon. Because the time is coming that I need to decide on my classes again. And that means deciding: high school or college?

Comments

[jehanne1431]

>>>>I want to teach. That much I do know. I just don't know who I want to teach. I want to teach English, but I want to teach literature. I want to listen as people tear stories apart and find the little tidbits that make talking about them interesting. <<<<



This is not high school. I taught high school English. I even taught the gifted students. They didn't care. They didn't want to discuss literature. They didn't want to be there. I actually had better students in my non-gifted classes. And this was in the age before teachers were competing with smartphones for their students' attention.

Maybe it was me. I am totally willing to own that. Personally, I think Education degrees fail the students in the courses, because you don't get any real classroom time until your student teaching semester, so it's all theory, and you've spent nearly four years learning how to be a teacher before you actually get to teach. The classroom is nothing at all like what the education textbooks make it out to be. Unless things have drastically changed in Education since I was in my program, you are taught how to teach the idealized classroom. The books don't say that, but that's what it is. The reality of classroom teaching is nothing at all like what is described in the textbooks. Ever seen Dangerous Minds? The scene where LouAnn is reading a textbook to learn how to get her class to pay attention to her is so. true. Except that I didn't need to worry about my kids shooting me. All this to say, I went into teaching English because I loved literature and wanted to lead kids into that passion and teach them the wonders of the written word (though I do love teaching grammar, too). I thought it would be like Dead Poets Society, and if it wasn't, I would be able to make it that way by the sheer power of my love of literature. I laugh now to think of how naive I was. Not only was I wrong, I was AMAZINGLY wrong. It was nothing like I was hoping for, and it didn't take me long to realize that teaching high school English was not for me. I really wish Education programs would throw teaching students into the deep end of the classroom early on in the program and not wait until after they have spent a fortune on 3.5 years worth of training that will not really prepare them for the reality of the classroom.

But that was me. You're an entirely different person with a totally different personality. Mine didn't mesh well with the high school dynamic. I think I'd do much better one-on-one or in a very small group. (that being said, I loved teaching English in Japan... and other teachers I know have told me that I've had very bad classroom experiences, so take all this with a grain of salt). I know others who love teaching high school English.

But generally speaking, if the above paragraph is what you're looking for, you probably won't find it in high school. You can find it in college, but all the crap English classes, like freshman composition, are usually assigned to new professors, so you probably won't be able to escape it in college, at least not at first. The awesome literature classes are given to those with tenure.

And yes, politics are everywhere. I could write novels about the politics of the schools where I taught.

Just my experiences. Take them with a shaker of salt. You're not me, and your experience in Education could be awesome and amazing. Two of my dearest friends are former high school English teachers who loved it.