Teachers: there are two types. The type that tell me
what I need to know to get a grade that says, “You’re smart,” and the type that
make me figure out what I need to
know. Curriculums and play by play directions are always available to a
teacher. Some of them scrape by giving the bare minimum of what is required,
but others really want me to learn.
Miss
Lucas wants me to learn. She gets so excited about teaching that she doesn’t realize
how much work she gives me; she loves to do work. Miss Lucas goes beyond what
is required by the state and the curriculums; she pours herself into her job
and she cares. She really grasps the need for understanding. But is it too much
work? Miss Lucas gets carried away, so I let her know how overwhelmed I am, and
she is very understanding. And of course all teachers say, “You need to
understand this! Don’t you get what I am teaching you?” No, Miss Lucas says,
“It’s okay to not understand, I want you to not understand. Let’s figure this
out together.”
Many
teachers, after having spent year after year with disrespectful blockheads, are
just fed up. They get bored and frustrated and stressed by their own workload,
and they slack. They teach what the curriculum says to teach, step by step, in
perfect formal order. They say, “Here’s what you have to do, here’s how to do
it, this is when it’s due, now go.” But what if I don’t get it? Do they
understand that I have a life? Other homework? Family matters? No, those
teachers don’t care. It’s probably because many of them don’t have lives
themselves.
Miss
Lucas is an individual teacher, one which is usually harder to find in a large
public school where cares are thrown high into the air. Yet I have found my way
into that left handed desk. In that desk I read and learn and dig and
understand and don’t understand and then understand again and I fill myself up
with the words on a page because Miss Lucas gives those words meaning. Now of
course I’ve had, have, and will have teachers who basically just suck. The
things they teach are boring and the kids in the class don’t care and so day
after day I just read textbooks and do worksheets, which the teacher never
makes up herself, and listen to her yell because none of us care. Miss Lucas
has never done that a day in my life. I doubt that she ever will. The students
in her class respect her because she gives life to the things that she teaches;
it isn’t boring, generic.
But
as I sit here and I type this essay my mind is whirling with all I have to get
done. Papers to write, books to read, extra credit to complete, grammar to
learn, more, more, more to brand into my brain and retain. High school is a
tiresome repetition of the same thing day after day and it will continue this
way for two and a half more years and there’s nothing I can do about that. So
I’m going to go read Les Miserables now, because Miss Lucas says it’s good.
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