CJ Manifesto

A quick FYI, before the plunge: I will generally try to post on Friday afternoons. It sounds like a good time to debrief myself after the week's mayhem, and I should have a little breathing room to blog before diving back into whatever paperwork or research demands my attention. Somehow I have stumbled upon a little free time mid-week, so I might as well take advantage of it to bang out a little character exposition.

This would not be a proper teaching journal without an entry explaining why I signed up to learn a profession that would give normal people nightmares. I better get this out of the way now, so I can refer back to it when my students get one over on me and I find myself asking what fit of madness drove me to this end.

Teaching math was never a childhood dream of mine. School bored the hell out of me on most days, and piled busywork onto my afternoons and evenings. I rarely derived any satisfaction from the extracurricular social circuit, with the notable exception of my high school drama club. Math was not even my favorite subject in those days; it was just a relatively benign speed bump between rehearsals. Once I got out of school, I never gave math a backwards glance.

To make a long story short, I squandered the next several years after my high school graduation. Having no clear purpose or passion, I drifted. I bounced from a failed year in community college to a failed year in the US Air Force, and then worked a ski resort retail job for two winters in Utah. Then I went back to Hermiston, Oregon (where I went to high school) and tried stocking shelves at Wal-Mart. I couldn't even hold that gig down for two weeks before the fear and loathing set in. Truly, I had struck bottom.

My medical discharge from the Air Force qualified me for assistance from Vocational Rehabilitation. After issuing a battery of psychological assessments and career aptitude tests, they recommended that I return to college to explore the sciences, and see what tickled my fancy. So I returned to Blue Mountain Community College. My second term, four years after taking college algebra, I dove into trigonometry and loved it. I landed a part-time job with the on-campus peer tutoring service, and discovered a knack for tutoring math to people intimidated by it. The rest, as they say, is history.

The funny thing is, I spent three out of my four college years telling myself that I would just tutor my way through school. Then I would quit. Surely I could do better for myself by pursuing a master's degree in math, or a doctorate. My advisor thought I could go that route. But many more of my tutoring clients thought I would make one hell of a teacher, and they wore me down in the end. I realized that I enjoyed helping other people crack their problems more than I liked solving my own. It's great fun to drop hints for people, push them, pull them, question them, and encourage them along until you can hear the tumblers click into place as they come to the logical solution they swore they could never reach on their own. The education bug had worked its way into my bloodstream to stay, much like the malaria parasite.

I suppose I should not complain too much. There are worse fates than finding one's calling in life, after all. I just hope that I can still feel that way when things turn sideways in the trenches. I will get a taste soon enough when I begin to observe classes at my first student teaching placement. I will have to remember that teaching is not just something to be done for fun, or even for the student loan waivers. When I worked as a college-level tutor, I saw how the fear of math held people back and threatened to derail their goals in school and life. That never felt right to me. Math should help, not hinder; it should bend minds without breaking spirits. Whenever I managed to help some fragile soul by tutoring, I could not deflect the idea that if certain math teachers had done better by that student in middle or high school, he or she would not have needed so much help from me in college. Having thought that, I now feel obligated to go back to the secondary level and try to accomplish whatever good I can within an imperfect system.

So that's how I rationalize my particular brand of madness. Ever since I entered the MAT, I have wondered what prompted my classmates into signing up. Why are you learning how to teach? I look forward to your comments on that question, or your own blog entries on that topic. And no, your stories need not sound as maudlin as my wall of text.