NYC Educator: Another Prospective Teacher Bites the Dust

NYC Educator: Another Prospective Teacher Bites the Dust:

Another Prospective Teacher Bites the Dust

Yesterday I was in a truck stop outside Albany, buying important supplies like the Oreo cookies my daughter demanded to make the last leg of our trip home. The young woman behind the counter started talking about how long the hours were at that particular job. I told her a good solution was to find a job she loved, and then she wouldn't think about the hours that way.

She revealed the not-very-well hidden secret that she didn't love her current job and went on to tell me she wanted to be a corrections officer. I was pretty surprised. I guess there are people who want that job but its allure eludes me utterly. She spoke of how you didn't know what would happen from one day to the next. Though I couldn't argue with that, that was a pretty strong reason I'd never want that job. I guess we should be grateful there are people who want jobs we don't, or there'd be a whole lot more of us doing jobs we didn't like.

I told her I was a teacher, and she said that involved doing the same thing every day. I told her she was wrong, and that you never know what kids are gonna do from one day to the next. I told her that was one of the things I really loved about this job. I didn't get to mention that kids do troublesome and difficult things all the time as well. Personally, I have a lot more patience for behavior like this from kids than I do for adults. Kids are supposed to test us. They're supposed to do all sorts of crazy nonsense and we're supposed to guide them to use their energies to find happiness, even if it doesn't earn us credit on VAM scorers.

Her next argument came pretty quickly. She told me she had a son in second grade, and that he struggled with math. She said there were complicated formulas he had to use to draw conclusions, and that he didn't have a textbook, that she NYC Educator: Another Prospective Teacher Bites the Dust: