Sunday, April 18, 2010

Why no one wants to be a teacher...

I've decided.

Its probably not the spitballs, exhausting work and terrible pay that drive most teachers to quit. They knew that going in.

Its probably not even the to-cool-for-school idiots that think life's a joke and are fated to drop out of community college and go serve at your local McDonalds.

After all, I can totally see a terrible feeling of smug gratification coming from that. "Oh, you didn't listen in my class and made my job hell? Welcome to the only industry that gets payed less than I do. And I do want that super sized, thank you very much."

Its the smart kids that come after you with a dagger after an hour or so of calculus when you still have 8/10'ths of an exam to still review.

If that sounds oddly specific, it isn't.
I swear.
Really.

Stop looking at me like that.

Ok, alright. I tutor several classmates here on campus in Calculus II. Except for the fact that I hardly have a handle on what is going on in that class and these sessions are never scheduled. It kinda goes down like this,

Classmate: "Hey, its the weekend before a test, can you teach me all the math stuff before then?"

So, I do the only thing and good college student would do:

I pull up my professor's old tests and half teach/half read through them. This works with varying degrees of success.

Lesson A) Complete and pass a level of math before attempting to teach it. Its handy.

Anyway, this teaching style was brought to a head last night as I was trying to teach logarithmic differentiation to Chuck (everyone in the blog is Chuck- even the girls).

The most common line out of his/her mouth: "WHY THE [family friendly blog] DO WE NEED THIS?"

Most common line out of my mouth:
A two way tie between: "PLEASE DON'T EAT ME and PLEASE DON'T STAB ME"

Good times- after all, I managed to teach the concept fairly well and kept both my legs.

Also, friends don't let friends smuggle daggers into the dorm. Its scary for the rest of us.

1 comment:

  1. I bet I know who it is. Knowing that, I understand your fear.

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