Teaching is not a Pit Stop

Teaching is not a pit stop.

Teaching is a calling; it is an end in itself, and not a layover between graduate degrees. My boss teaches middle school after several years in the business world and a decade or so of mothering. I'm glad she's getting her masters, and I'm glad she's gone back to work somewhere important, but I found out a few days ago that she doesn't plan to stay. She's not a bad teacher-- she's more effective than many, unfortunately, but you can tell that she's not with the kids. She holds her biological children up as academic ideals and is quicker to catagorize kids as unintelligent than I would like. Finally able to work with a boy she's been considering as not smart enough for our college preperatory program, I uncovered an incredible curiousity masked by huge gaps in his education. He is blocked by his misguided ideas that the sun is an asteroid and that wind is caused by the earth's rotation, but his desire to learn is real and waiting to be harnessed by someone who's interested in teaching him, instead of doubting him.

My boss says that she doesn't feel challenged as she'd like to be in her current position. She wants to teach at the University level. College students are complicated, but we have nothing on middle-schoolers, especially these middle-schoolers. Every other kid has a home life I can't imagine, and the social pressures of adolescence are pushing into their lives, but there is so much potential in each one of them that needs to be teased out and pushed. The longer no one expects anything out of them, the smaller that pool of potential becomes.

Middle school is a bridge to professorship for my boss, because she is not being intellectually challenged.

My boss teaches Foods.