Everything happens for a reason.

In an odd coincidence, I was asked a question regarding my reasoning for being a teacher twice on Tuesday.  I had a job interview (not for a teaching position) and one of the only questions I was asked was “so why did you decide to become a teacher?”  Later on that night, I was catching up with an old friend, and we started talking about my internship.  The same question popped up!  I found it rather peculiar that I answered the question twice.  The reason for me deciding to pursue a path in education has never changed.

I taught guitar lessons to students from ages 5-45 for about two years when I was living in Sherwood Park, AB.  This job came to me through a man who had started his own contracting company that dealt with music lessons.  He would get the calls from parents or potential students who were interested in lessons, and from there, he’d send out a selection of those people to me (as I was not the only contract teacher that he had).  In my first year, I had twenty students.  Most of the students that I taught had little to no experience.  At the time, I had thought teaching guitar was fairly easy and fun.  The job paid well, but was not full time as lessons were once a week for half an hour.  To fill in my extra hours, I picked up a job at Superstore.

Working at Superstore was an absolute joke.  The pay was terrible, the vast majority of the management were complete tools, and the work was mindless and excruciating.  I had three or four friends who worked in the same department that kept me on the edge of sanity, as I was clearly about to jump off it most of the time.  My shifts lasted around the 5-6 hour mark and they crawled by me at a snail’s pace.  It was misery.  To say the least, the last thing I wanted to do when I got home from such a shift was work another job.

Regardless, I didn’t have a choice.  I’d come home, and prepare for the 4-5 lessons I had to teach usually an hour after I got off work at Superstore.  I’d either get in my car or set up chairs and amps in my room, as certain lessons were taught out of the students’ homes, and some were taught in my room!  Pretty cozy work environment.  I started to realize that the environment I worked in played a significant role in the overall enjoyment of my job.  I also discovered that communicating with people was another aspect of working that I enjoyed, so long as that communication was constructive and/or positive.

My guitar teaching calendar ran on the same calendar as the kids’ school calendars.  Therefor I started up in September and finished mid-June.  During the finishing months of my lessons, I started to realize something profound: my students were learning. In the course of the year, I was literally witnessing the progress they had made as guitar players.  Some were playing along to their favourite green day songs on CD, while before, they couldn’t remember how to finger specific chords.  Some of the students had learned simplified versions of solos of AC/DC, and could play along in accompaniment, where before they had troubles picking the right strings.  I had specific students who could have been considered at the top of the class, had I taught all 20 at once.  They were playing songs with the skill level of a third or fourth year player.

In realizing that my students were learning, another light bulb illuminated!  Was I responsible for this progress?  Well no, not entirely.  Did I have a hand in it?  Absolutely.  I provided the students with the tools necessary to succeed, along with the encouragement that was due to them.  On top of that, I loved every single minute of it, even the minutes with the students that never practiced.  Thus, the energy I was bringing to the table became contagious.  My students loved it all the same as I did.  It became starkly clear that I had tapped into something I had never experienced before.  Kind of like the first time you’re conscious of the love you have for something or someone.  What I had tapped into was the notion that the reward of seeing my students succeed in their goals, and having a part in it, was more rewarding than getting paid to do it.  No matter how worn down I was by my mundane job at Superstore, I never had a bad day teaching guitar.  Never.

As I spoke with my friend on Tuesday, he said something to me that concerned him.  He wanted to know that I wasn’t one of those teachers that got into it because I felt it was the only thing I could get through in university.  I needed clarity.  What did he mean by this?  That education was among the simplest of programs in university?  No, he meant that he wanted to make sure I had my reasons lined up for why I chose education, as opposed to choosing by default because I wasn’t interested in anything else there.  I assured him this was not the case.  Not once did I choose to be in education simply because the other academic paths did not appeal to me.  Not only that, when I came to all those realizations of what teaching meant to me back in 2005-2006, I wondered why my own education couldn’t have been as exciting as this had proven to be.  I had so many teachers whose influence on me was more negative than positive.  Not one teacher that I had made me stand up and say: “What you do is incredible!  I want to do what you do for a living!”  Quite the opposite, in fact.  I had more teachers than I could count who made me want to say: “You blow at this, and I could do it much better than you.”  Now I’m not trying to boast, but I believe that if anyone cared enough to change something they saw being done wrong, they would.  It only makes sense that I should do this.  The fact that I love it and that I feel it’s a personal duty to the world around me act as motivators for one another, in that if I lose faith in one, the other picks up the slack.

In the end, I know why I’m here.  I’ve had doubts and second thoughts, but I believe that’s a part of the learning process in reaffirming that I’m on the right path.  This internship has been one of those reaffirmations.

(In)consistency.

I have come to the halfway point of my internship and am overcoming challenges I was not even aware I’d face.  The surreal feeling I had when I first came into the school has drifted, and now it actually starts to feel l belong there.  That is, until, you really start to wonder if what you’ve been doing is actually making a difference.  Funny enough these doubts come to me during the busiest part of my internship.  I’m thinking that it could not be a more inconvenient time, but at the same time, perhaps that’s the way it’s supposed to work out.  I’m stressing on a daily basis for what I will be teaching the very next day, that I start to lose sight of the big picture.

By big picture I don’t mean the final outcome or product that my students learn at the end of the unit, or the final exam they need to write when everything’s said and done.  I mean big picture in a sense that there’s more to teaching than just standing up in front of a classroom and spewing out some shit I typed out on a word processor mere hours ago.

I’ve found myself doubting my purpose simply because I have begun teaching those lessons I don’t really care to teach.  The ones where I feel like I’m just pushing stuff in and out of kids’ ears to fill a curriculum guideline and/or protocol.  I’ve expended so much energy on the formal aspects of teaching these past few weeks that I’ve lost sight of my somewhat creative nature.  For the first time I saw reasons for why educator-burnout occurs.  It was frightening.  I felt this bleak sensation of jadedness.

I’ve spent the last two days picking myself up again, albeit slowly.  I’ve been taking small steps in my class and have been trying to push on sending out my true intentions and expectations of students.  I think this is a smart step because it will get me back on track with the kind of person I want to be, not only as an educator but as a human being.  I want to be able to show my personality however I feel I may have shown a little too much within the recent weeks.  And in showing too much I feel like I was behaving like someone that I am not.

Someone once told me as a piece of advice that I need to display consistency in my character.  I’ve been thinking about it for some time now and I feel like I’m closer to understanding why that is important.

Inspiring individualism.

As pre-service teachers, we’re being put through an educational maze to try and figure out where it is that we belong at the end.  Some of us have focus in the sciences, and some of us have focus in geography.  Some of us focus on music & literature while others focus on social issues and physical standards to live by.  Some of us focus on getting out of education as quick as possible, because we have discovered education as a profession is not for us.  Regardless, depending on where you’re at in your program, you may have noticed that inspiration is the Faculty of Education’s forté… right?

A great deal of effort that we students put towards are the ideologies of what makes a great teacher over a good one.  It is in the Faculty’s best interests to push out from this university some of the country’s best teachers, and on that note, we are bombarded by various articles, speakers, and resources alike suggesting education is not just teaching.  It is ohhhhh so much more.

For one thing, you might have heard this: “To become an educator, you must become a life-long learner.”  It is one of this faculty’s mottos, you could say.  In order to educate, you must learn.  You must always be learning.  It is as though you must center the rest of your life around learning.  Learning about what?

Yes, finally, my point.

If you have asked this question to yourself at all, you are not alone.  Although sometimes I feel as though I am.  I believe the answer is simply about myself, about you, about our students.  Learn about yourself.  Learn about what makes you you.  Why is it that you are the way you are?  I am asking myself the same questions.  Not only should you be learning about yourself, you should be learning about your colleagues, and your students.  Learning about why they’re so special too.  We should be encouraging that.  I will wholeheartedly agree that every student is different.  It is more difficult for me to believe that every student is “special.”  If one means special as in unique, then yes, of course.  In that case, every student is special.  But I’m speaking in terms of individualism, and how to inspire individualism in students.  Because I have a very good feeling that not every student knows who they are.  Just as I did not.  Just as I still am not completely sure.  Some people can spend their lifetimes pondering this (hence, life-long learning).  Students take so much from the environment around them to try and build some sense into who they think they are.  Now, I am by no means saying that a student that doesn’t know who she/he is, is not special.  I would simply think that a student who has a better idea about themselves and about who they want to be has a better chance at achieving that.  That is where we come in as teachers.  Bringing out that individualism that students need so they feel like they have a place in the world, just like we all needed before we discovered we wanted to be teachers.

I was inspired by so many of my teachers who were not inspired to inspire me.

Help yourself so you know how to help your students.  I would love to construct an “educational philosophy” about my beliefs and ideals towards teaching, but in all honesty, I’d like to just construct a plain old philosophy about my beliefs and ideals towards life first.   SO, what I’m essentially getting at is, if one is void of inspiration, motivation, and all the like-terms, how does one expect to motivate others to learn, let alone learn about oneself, and truly inspire individualism?