Yesterday's diary regarding "giving up" on the
Great American Sickout generated quite a bit of response, most of it snide and negative. My mojo took quite a beating and I even scored my first zero. But that's OK. Maybe I deserved it for dissing teachers; then again, I have met an awful lot of dumb, lazy teachers in my time, an observation statistically backed by the fact that the typical Education major's SAT score (>1000) is roughly 27 percent lower than what I would consider moderately respectable (~1300) so maybe I was on to something there. An ancient Chinese proverb says, "The one who got angry is the one who took the shit." (Translation for the figuratively challenged, of which there seem to be many around here: "If you get angry in a dispute, it's because you're the one who's in the wrong." I sure wasn't the one who got angry! In fact, I was giggling like a schoolgirl at some of the responses.
But I've digressed...
What is a great teacher? A great teacher is a modest person. (More ancient Chinese wisdom: "The greatest master is the one who hopes that his students will surpass him.") A great teacher is a motivator, not a friend. A great teacher can even come across as a tremendous dick, like Socrates or my advisor on one of my theses, who pushed me and taunted me and belittled me until I managed to produce (his words) "the work of a scholar." (Chinese alert!) "The strongest, sharpest blade is forged in the hottest fire." Learning is not easy. Great teachers can be real dicks -- not that I'm a great teacher, mind you, though I will admit to dickishness, especially when someone comes across as dishonest, such as the teacher who claims, "I work eight hours a day, seven days a week."
(Special to the originator of the above quotation: You must be a really slow reader. I recall having spent a few hours on a Sunday afternoon grading papers on rare occasions, but never having to devote eight hours of a weekend day to marking or preparing lesson plans. The one who got angry is the one who shit. That really hit a raw nerve when I brought up the languorous break you enjoy each summer vis a vis the one day you could not deign to take off to end senseless killing, ostensibly because your work was too important to society. That says a lot.)
I'm not going to bore you with stories of my own personal favorite teachers. Sure, Mrs. L inspired a lifelong love of math in me, and she was no pushover. And Professor C blew my mind three times a week for an entire semester -- and made me earn every bit of the proud A- I got in his class (He never gave out A's as a rule). Unfortunately, those few standouts are overshadowed by my later experience in the teacher's lounge, overhearing the same banal conversations about sports, jerky parents, jerky administrators, jerky students, TV shows, retirement, summer vacation repeated ad nauseum. There were a few great teachers among that lot, but they, like me (and again, as an arrogant prick I exclude myself from the ranks of great teachers which is a big part of the reason I left the profession), generally spent the lunch hour in the library or at their desks reading something or even at our desks assisting the most eager of our students. The teacher's lounge drove me away from teaching forever. If you don't believe that many teachers are idiots, bug the teacher's lounge of your local public high school sometime. What other profession gets a "lounge," anyway? The lounge is somewhere you go after work, not during the two free periods of your eight-period day.
Let me be blunt: By and large, American public school teachers flat-out suck. Every statistic imaginable backs me up. This is not to say that there aren't good and great teachers out there fighting the tide in the public schools (and may Goddess bless those patient souls), but that 30 percent is overwhelmed by the other 70 percent of lazy slobs in the teacher's lounge. Some of the excellent public school teachers whom I have the privilege of knowing well would agree with this assessment, I am certain.
So, without further adieu, here is my list of favorite teachers:
1. Gandhi
(Now there's a guy who never, ever would have advocated civil disobedience to counter grave injustice!)
- Buddha
- Socrates
- Jesus
(Note: The last two were
executed because they were such good teachers, so take your zero ratings from yesterday and shove 'em. I still say turn over the tables of the money changers!)
- Bucky Fuller
- Timothy Leary
(Chased out of science because he had the audacity to claim that we are not at the pinnacle of evolution, not, as commonly presumed, because he advocated LSD as a vehicle for evolving.)
8. John Lennon
(Imagine...)
9. Einstein
(A great teacher who wasn't afraid or ashamed of being called an idler...)
10. George W. Bush
(May his administration be a lesson to us all...)
May the lesson you learn from George W. Bush be: Don't let your country turn into a belligerent, fascist, rogue state. "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance..."
Stand up and be counted on December 7. Show 'em that you're sick of it.