It is a sad truth, teachers make the worst students. I have had this nagging, lingering and disturbing thought ever since I became a teacher and a bad student some 45 years ago when teaching was still in its infancy.
I recently took a computer seminar at an Waterloo Apple store. I was having trouble keeping up with the rest of the class which was composed of just my wife. She catches on quickly, is attentive, asks good questions and excels at what she does. She is not a teacher.
I do not want to cast disparaging innuendo on her profession, but suffice it to say social workers see the human condition differently than the rest of us. The thesis of this my little cathartic message became clear to me when my Apple instructor asked me what I did. You know for a living. Averting eye contact and while mumbling and fiddling with my wireless mouse I told him that I was a teacher. Somehow in the student role I do not seem to possess any of the self- confident, super hero characteristics of my professional persona. In truth I was feeling very vulnerable as if my mouse pad was a slice of Kyrptonite.
“Teacher, they make the worst students. They always want to know the answers right away.” His laugh almost made me feel that I was being mocked. I know a mocking tone when I hear one. I just knew at that moment I should have told him I was a social worker, but it was too late for that.
I had to think for a moment or two about what my youthful tech savvy instructor had said to me and eventually and internally I had to agree with him. Teachers make bad students. Join me in a flashback, or better have one of your own if you don’t want to use one of mine. I was thinking about any number of conferences, seminars, lectures, guest speaker appearances, staff meeting, and committee meetings and as my professional life passed before me in a dramatic but very quick mental VHS format video loop, I could think of teachers in all of these situations doing all the same stupid things we don’t want, and never would allow, our own students to do. I have witnessed, at various times and places, teachers passing notes, talking during prayer and/ or announcements, laughing at jokes during meetings, texting (imagine that), marking papers, passing notes (low tech texting)and generally being inattentive at all the wrong times. Teachers are bad listeners and students.
Why is this you may ask? Why this ironic turn of events?
Theorem #1 states that because teachers have never left school and spend much of their time in discipline mode, correcting, marking, wiping noses, encouraging, motivating, putting on kid’s snow suits, nagging, directing, lecturing, modeling and much more we each at some point reach a neuron saturation point in our long term memory. Some neurons actually start to fray at the end like a used worn out piece of useless rope. In a situation in which teacher becomes student, say at a seminar or staff meeting, there is almost a spontaneous polar reversal of actions, values, attitudes and therefore behavior and we almost predictably begin to act out in bizarre ways and become like the very people we don’t want to be…our students. It is a release of pent up emotions associated with doing one thing over a career and all of a sudden, in all the wrong places, we act out.
I would like to think that we, as teachers, are not the only professionally confused group. I can think of examples in which accountants don’t manage their personal finances efficiently, or even do their own income tax returns. Nurses and doctors, I am convinced make the worst patients. Rhetorically, I’ll just add that I would bet that off duty policemen/women are not all paragons of virtue, and in the same sentence some prostitutes may have a bad love life. Do Sarah Lee and Betty Crocker really like baked goods. Does the Michelin Man have a driver’s license? Does the Pillsbury Dough Boy have an eating disorder? Is Uncle Ben really someone’s uncle.? I could go on. Let me just say that as teachers we do not stand alone in our professional role reversal dilemma.
Theorem #2 states that, and is also predicated on the fact that we as a profession have never been out of school in our entire lives. I mean look at me. I am 70 and I am still in high school. How disturbing is that on some Freudian level? My id and ego just don’t want to have anything to do with each other anymore and it is getting extremely serious.
So the theory goes that because of this sustained time in the school system we have never really grown up and therefore when given the chance, in a setting in which we have to be a student, we often fail miserably because we have never really matured on some levels and faced the real world.
Okay, those aren’t really my words, but I do know a certain social worker who fed me this idea, in fact she texted it to me while in an Apple computer class, yet another sad little irony I thought.
Marty Rempel
