School Teacher

I cannot praise school teachers enough.  My experience of them is not limited to the years I myself sat in class, nor the decades watching and listening to my children as they returned from their daily schooling.  No, I have even substitute taught in more than one school room, once for a period of several weeks, once when I was asked to take on for a term the course of a teacher who left.  I am a college professor so I understood the bare mechanics of standing before a group of persons younger than myself and delivering information, information hitherto unavailable to them.  Anyone who knows school teaching will already by laughing.  The information, yes, sounds like a college professor, yes, get up there, open your mouth, and deliver the facts.  As I discovered, there was so much more to the experience than that.  The first thing I discovered is that young people en masse are unnerving to face.  They are in motion, they squirm, they cannot sit still, as opposed to college students who have somehow miraculously over the summer from school graduation to college entrance, have learned to sit still, and pay some sort of attention.  Many youngsters in school have a tendency to act out; seasoned teachers expect this and know how to accommodate it and soothe the child.  The person running the classroom will oversee her charges and note their various psychological states.  The school is there to help children develop the skills of learning which are many, and are acquired in different persons at different speeds, and are impeded or encouraged in different ways by various human psychologies--children are not at all alike.  For a college professor who was used to impersonally (perhaps wittily, cleverly, warmly, and sympathetically, but still neutrally) dishing out the facts and nothing but the facts, this was like playing a pinball machine, there was so much to attend to all the time. I failed at the basic task which is known as controlling the class.  That does not mean intimidating them nor tying them down, it means having the miracle capacity of engaging with twenty intellects and personalities and the same time and offering encouragement and restraint as needed.  It is an immense challenge, made all the more so when the youngsters come from homes where there are severe emotional problems whether from the desperation of too many work hours and too low pay, a dependence upon alcohol or drugs to make it through the day, any number of pressures that appear in hovels and appear in mansions.  No child is immune.   I stuck it out for three weeks when I was the substitute teacher, I quit after ten days when I was hired as a replacement for the term.  School teaching is a skill that requires not only intellect and knowledge, but a commitment of heart and soul and extraordinary subtlety.  No wonder teachers burn out; yes, either refresh them or replace them, but never, never underestimate the extraordinary demands of the job