I recently wound up in a conversation with a friend’s dad about teaching. It started with a quick diagnosis of my profession and led to a larger conversation about that choice and what that means you ascribe to in terms of personal goals. This was a really important conversation to have at this particular crossroad in my professional life. I was reminded of my original intention in teaching: I wanted to find someone who wanted to be a teacher and reach and cultivate that individual to reach others. On the surface it sounds like a prosyletic meme or, more specifically, a self replicating virus. In some ways the teaching faith can be that. However, I achieved that goal years ago. So now what?
The conversation led me through the various reasons I taught and teach. The replacement doctrine has long passed. Now I primarily teach in order to share cool shit, which is not exactly why I started doing it in the first place. Somewhere in the middle of my career (thus far) I was teaching to learn about the students and the local culture and how to be better as a teacher. Ultimately I should be trying to marry those two doctrines together and become more of a holistic teacher who wants to both learn cool shit and share cool shit. Essentially that is what I do in my summer Sci-fi Learning Community and in my Creative Writing courses. Not coincidentally, that is where I have the most fun.
Some Thoughts:
- If there is one lesson my kids need to learn from me it is the importance of silence. Few kids I know, and especially not my own, appreciate moments of silence. I feel like kids should meditate every day in order to center themselves and reflect. I’ll try to make that part of our routine, but I have to be honest about where I am with routines involving kids. My followthrough is not strong, because it is pretty tough to keep them doing X, Y, or Z.
- One more routine ought to involve reading for at least 30 minutes a day, because that is basically gone from their lives short of reading the text scrolling by on the latest anime episode.
- Despacito is one of the most brilliant songs out right now. This is not because of what it says but of who is on it. Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee played on the popularity of Justin Bieber to introduce a latin club banger to the mainstream, and then quickly and thoroughly outperformed Beiber on the track. Well played.