ALT-4 What you need to know before you become a Teacher
The first thing you need to know before you become a teacher is that there are two kinds of teachers out there. There are those who teach a subject, and those who teach kids. Teachers who enter this profession to teach a subject do it for various rationales. Some love history and therefore hope to impart that knowledge to their students. Others love to hear themselves talk about the subjects they are interested in. These kinds of teachers are effective in colleges where people pay to be lectured to, and oft times, in high school honors classes where kids are preparing to go to college to pay someone to lecture to them. However, in my experience, these types of teachers are largely ineffective in the middle school setting.
This leaves us with those who wish to teach children. Teaching children and teaching a subject are vastly different approaches to education. While the teacher, who goes to work everyday in hopes of teaching children, might be quite knowledgeable in her subject area, she knows that teaching grammar isn't necessarily the most important thing her students can glean from her. Students today are faced with an abundance of adult-like problems. They deal with things children of the 80's never imagined. Due to this phenomenon, teachers who teach children understand that they first need to care about their students before any formal subject matter can be applied.
The major difference between those who teach a subject and those who teach children is simply the amount of heart involved. If I go to work to teach a subject, I can leave each day feeling comfortable about the amount of material I covered, the facts I revealed and perhaps even the percentage of correctly regurgitated answers on the pop quiz I gave. However, if I go to work to teach kids, leaving work has an entirely different effect. I might have noticed that my best student isn't interacting in class. So, since I teach children I will have taken him outside for a conversation. At which point he might reveal to me that his mother has cancer. Now, when I leave work, that student is on my mind. Since I care, I know that tomorrow's grammar lesson on the proper usage of semi-colons isn't going to be of any benefit to him. Therefore, I might pick an article about cancer survivors and read that to the whole class. Teaching children is about finding out what they need to learn from you, not just lecturing them about punctuation or the Civil War.
