The Scattered Thoughts of Me

Sometimes I wonder if I think too much. After talking with a friend a little bit yesterday about being a teacher, I spent a lot of time thinking about some of the teachers I had when I was in school. I was thinking specifically about two of my math teachers from junior high and high school, and the things I learned from them. I teach math, but I like teaching science much better. Teaching math is just part of the package that comes along with teaching science here, and I'm pretty good at the sort of math we do in junior high and high school, but I wouldn't have a clue with differential equations, finite math, or anything more than just the basics of calculus. In my little K-12 country school, I believe that I had two of the best math teachers out there. They were both gifted with the ability not just to do math and show examples, but to really explain and teach it. I had another math teacher in high school who was very good at math, but wasn't a very good math teacher. But my teachers for 7th grade math, algebra I, geometry, and advanced math were great. Mr. Anderson was a hippie from California. I'm not sure how he ended up in Bell Buckle, but apparently it was just the fit for him. He drove either an old VW bug that his son and he had spray-painted bright colors and written "Splendido Art Colony" all over (which by chance he later sold to my brother), or an old BMW motorcycle. Now he drives an old beat-up Jeep. He had quotes from Latin covering his walls, he made us do our homework so neatly that we could only fit two addition problems to a page, and he would make the girls leave the room to tell the boys jokes that made no sense. Some might call Mr. Turrentine a hillbilly, but I don't know about that. I would call him a genius from the backwoods. He was building his own house out in the woods; he paid his way through college milking cows; and his wife and he played the fiddle, the penny whistle, the hammered dulcimer, and a range of other mountain instruments (probably including the jug). Most of the geometry we learned was related to carpentry. These two teachers taught me math in a way I could understand and remember it. They taught me to figure out things for myself, to be meticulous, to pay the utmost attention to detail, to put my effort into doing things correctly rather than simply looking for the right answers, and to really enjoy math. They were great teachers, and I learned so much from them, but there is no doubt in my mind that the majority of the people in my class completely missed it all. Despite the fact that I consider them so gifted at teaching math, they simply weren't able to teach the majority of the students in the class the things they taught me, and most of those students left the class with the same disgust for math which they had upon entering. So now that I'm teaching math and wishing that I had that gift of being able to explain and really teach math, I wonder how much it would really matter. E'en if I were as good a math teacher as Mr. Anderson and Mr. Turrentine, many of my students would simply not understand. They would not come to love math or appreciate its importance or its centrality to all learning. They would simply leave being able to get the right answers (some of them), and never learn to apply it to life beyond school. I think very highly of my students (certainly more highly than I think of my old classmates), but that is simply the way of things. Most people don't see things the way I see them. I tried my best to instill in them a sense of pride for their neatly written work, or a clean classroom, or a well-swept sidewalk, but they ne'er got it. So sometimes it gets me down to think that if I did my best, or if I could e'en be the best, it would make little difference to most of my students. Most of them just want to get in and get out, knowing that they have to get in to get out, that they have to do math and science, just to leave it all behind, before they can finish school. So what's the point of me, then? I suppose I have to be the one to find a way to teach them the things they don't e'en know they need to learn. Is that my role, to force them to do things they don't want to do and might ne'er come to appreciate? E'en so, I still have keep up hope that I might be able to make a little positive difference or that I might make one spark set something off somewhere, though I may ne'er see it.

Man, I'll tell you what, this writing business is wearing me out. I'm probably doing too much at the beginning to get this blog started, and will soon drop off significantly in both quantity and (if possible) quality of writing. But for now I hope I don't. I consider this a worthwhile undertaking, e'en if very few people actually read it. You know who you are. Thanks again for reading.