What Am I Doing as a Teacher?

I just spent yesterday, the last day of my first gig as a speech and debate teacher for 2nd-4th graders, making a cheat sheet and a packet of example speeches and rhetorical tools.

I didn't think I would be doing this in life.

Not that it's bad. It's that when I was in high school, I thought being a teacher would be the worst option for me. The long hours, the grading quizzes and tests, the teaching. I didn't think I could do it.

But I'd been in speech and debate club in my high school years, and I'd just spent the last two years of my life honing my skills to be a persuasive, argumentative, educational writer of biology and neuroscience. Before that, I had taken AP language and composition in high school, which is a class where you have to write an essay almost every day. And you only have an hour to write it. My hands cramped up a lot in that class. And I'd been practicing how to write persuasive essays in college for my undergraduate's degree. All this to say, I have the qualifications. But I didn't think I had the spirit.

I thought the spirit of teaching is about working with kids - enjoying working with them - and enjoying the work of grading, of teaching, of monitoring growth and making sure the kids didn't rip the classroom apart. That may be the spirit of teaching for some teachers, but it turns out it's different for me.

To me, the spirit of teaching is about working to not traumatize the kids - to help them learn, help them grow, teach them skills - but doing so in a way that I hope the kids don't feel anxious thinking about me. I remember I loved biology in high school, and my AP biology class was taught by a teacher who I swore had a personal vendetta against me. She didn't like me, and I didn't like her. It didn't help that I had developed test anxiety, and had things going on in my life. And this class was the first one in the morning, so I'd be dead tired after getting five hours of sleep. And I hated using the school-issued computers. They worked like crap, felt like crap, and were heavy as heck while also breaking down often enough that the tech service in the library was always running. That was a class that while I learned in, gave me anxiety and anger to think about.

I remember those feelings. I may not remember what the teacher looked like, or how to spell her name, and maybe even the sound of her voice, but I remembered how she made me feel - stupid, small, insignificant. A failure.

I swore to myself that I would never make someone under my tutelage feel the same way. I wouldn't be their cause of nightmares, of anxiety, of depression, of stress. I wouldn't be the one that they thought of years later as a monster, or a terrible person. I wouldn't be the one to veer a student away from a subject - not that she did, I was still firmly on the biology route - because of my attitude. I wouldn't be their cause of trauma.

And you know what? I think I succeeded.

That last class, students were telling me they loved speech and debate and they hated that it was the last time I'd be teaching them. Some students asked me if I'd be teaching at their school again. And I hoped I would, because some of the students were wonderful.

When I gave them the cheat sheets I'd made - I typed those up in Word Doc, I formatted them, I thought of what would be most helpful - their eyes lit up and it felt all worth it. Those packets as well - examples of speeches, ranging from easy to hard, where they had to point out pathos, logos, ethos, and what parts made them feel or think what. I hoped that these two handmade gifts would allow them to practice their speech and debate skills, even though they had no tournament to go to (they were 2nd-4th graders; too young for tournaments) those tools would help them in future classes. I told them to ask me as many questions as they wanted about the subject. I invited them up in front of the class to make speeches (some of them took me up on that offer). I asked them to keep the sheets in their backpack, to look at them for reference, and then when that last class ended I sent them off to their parents.

I never thought I'd be a teacher. My Russian grandmother is a teacher - one of the best - and I have those teaching genes in me. But I got my degree in science writing, which means informing others of scientific matters. I thought that would be just other adults, and perhaps it will be in a future career. But it turns out the audience age doesn't quite matter, when it's teaching about the wonders of a thing I find fascinating and fun.

In this economy and age, I hope to continue my gigs as a teacher. It's nice to have an income, to have some type of employment while America seems to perpetually be on fire. But it's also nice to get out of the house and do something that comes naturally pleasant to me. To socialize with other teachers; learn from them as my students learn from me. To figure out the code of getting kids to understand the subject. Of helping them as I would have liked to be helped when I was that age.

If in the future those students go to speech and debate clubs, or take English classes where they have to write essays all the time, and they find what I told them or left them to be helpful, then I've succeeded in my goal.

I've helped. I'm happy.