A good teacher is a good person first
But sometimes being a good person only sometimes gets you to be a good teacher.
I’m a college teacher. I’ve taught since ten years ago at the university where I graduated. I started early in my career as a professor. I was only 25 years old when I had my first class. The funny thing is that most of the students were friends. People from two generations later than mine and people with whom I worked on my projects in college.
Usually, I have a few classes per semester. One or two. Mostly because I worked in another company and didn’t have the time to do more courses. But, when I quit my day-to-day job to be more involved in the academy, I started to get more hours per semester. Still, that wasn’t enough to get a full-time contract, and in the end, I ended up starting my PhD program, so that way I could get more opportunities in the academy work (and a full-time contract).
Something that I knew I would like to do as a teacher is to encourage my students and involve them to learn, teach them that knowledge is not only power but also it can be fun. I started to study more about pedagogy and methodology, try new ways to approach the contents to them and make them feel that this time in college can be fun and not just stressful.
My classes usually are project-based. They have to do some projects like in real life. They have to work in teams sometimes, they have to make decisions, and mostly they have to make plans and put that plan in motion. As the years pass by, I meet different kinds of groups: the ones that have just started the uni and come up with these ideas and dreams, the ones that are finishing their career and are exhausted or tired of everything, and a mix of both groups.
The last group, the one that I have now, are just kids of 19 and 20 years more of them, but they are already burned out. This is the second year for most of them and it is the end of the semester. These past two weeks have been stressful as f*&k. I know it is not the first or the last time that I have met a group of young adults who want to have their way of things, but for some reason, this year feels different.
I try to empathize with them. Understand their point of view and whatever is happening in their lives, but I think that they also need to learn some basic stuff. The first one is that as adults we work under pressure. There are moments in life when we need to finish the stuff we are doing even though it is not perfect. The second one is that the final notes/ GPE or grades, are not important. Not in the real world. You can have really good grades and still be unemployed or do your job badly. I know about it because I was that student of B’s and A’s and had really good grades at the end of my career but still struggled a lot in the company world.
So yes, I consider myself a good person, but sometimes it doesn’t matter how hard I try, I’m not so sure if I’m a good teacher. I try my best, I plan my class, I make mistakes I try to do better, I ask them what they need and what they want, I find new ways to deliver the content… and still, at the of the semester I always feel a little guilty because someone didn’t finish the quiz or didn’t send the assignment on time… Sometime I feel that I should be more strict, more like some teachers that I know that are like a wall.
But again, this world is full of people who are not nice enough, and sometimes the kids just need a teacher who puts music at the beginning of the class and starts singing to lift a little the mood. Sometimes we just need someone to be nice to us.
