by Morton Mcinvale

Created on: June 18, 2009

Teaching is a special mission, a calling. . .an art. Like any art, teaching involves passion and sacrifice. Anyone who thinks it is simply a job - beware! Unfortunately, the school system itself leads the band in the beat to make teaching just that: a job. And if I had treated it as "just a job," . . .perhaps I would still be teaching today. Passion and commitment would not allow it. When every teacher is teaching the same lesson at the same time from the same script and when public education has a clone conducting every class - please, don't laugh, it's coming - the teacher will join the dodo bird and the dinosaur on the list of extinct creatures. So forgive me for a moment if I mourn for all those special teachers I have known and for those many more I have never had the privilege of knowning.

Two days following my father's funeral, the assistant superintendent of the board of education in our small county called me in to the office to notify me that my contract would not be renewed for 2009-2010. So I am engulfed with a number of conflicting emotions. There is/was my father. . ."Those who can do, those who can't teach," he quipped once. My son - class salutatorian for 2008-2009 - suffered through years of boredom and lack of challenge (to put it mildly) from the 5th to the 12th grades. And me, an elementary school teacher who passionately believed in the possibilities of education and in each and every student I ever had. . .now burned out, disillusioned.

Disillusioned. Not with the students, not with the teachers, and not with the possibilities, but with the system of education that has become simply a bureaucracy. Like all bureaucracies, its chief mission is self-preservation and its reason for being - education - is less important than its simply BEING.

But teaching - true teaching - is not and cannot be bureaucratized, canned, cloned . . .because teaching is an individual act of creation.

Many of the best and wisest and kindest people I have ever known are teachers. They have within them a love - a need - to share with and help others. Yes, there are those who do treat teaching as simply a job, a reasonably foolproof way of making a decent salary (and if they are not serious about teaching, they probably do take the summer off). The true teachers? They never stop learning. They carry homework, lesson plans, tests, whatever it may be, to the soccer game, football practice, even grade papers on Christmas Eve.. And miss out on

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>