B O R I N G I S B A D
One has to be a pupil before one can teach. But that doesn’t
mean that once one becomes a teacher they stop learning. These processes
usually go hand in hand. Show me a teacher that has stopped learning, and I
would recommend for one of his pupils to take his pulse, I assume it would be
found that he has been dead for the last few years. If he were a music teacher,
I would ask his students to restrain from making any deadbeat remarks, or if he runs the school paper the journalist
better not make any deadline
comments. The teacher is always learning because of outside influences; books,
newspapers, T.V., radio, and also people smarter than the teacher. The process
of teacher-pupil is a two-way thing. The teacher can actually learn something
from his students? Of course! It doesn't necessarily have to be about the
subject he teaches, but about behavior and attitudes at the very least. But
does it stop here? Of course not! There are many things a teacher can learn
from his students. He soon finds out that a homework paper is a dog’s favorite
food. He learns that it was much more fun to be a student than it is to be a
teacher. He learns many things. Sometimes even about his own specialty. Of
course not! (Oh, sorry… I was
getting sort of used to saying that…)
Some of us will never learn. Some seem to never lose hope.
There are still people who have never heard of Murphy's Law. Others, though
they have heard of it either don't believe it, or don't see the sense in it.
These people are lawbreakers.
It’s not a good idea to make Mr. Murphy unhappy by breaking
his law. This is a very serious crime. Lack of negative thinking is an epidemic
that is ruining our society. Although when there is a lot of negativeness
around, it makes me almost look positive, and I wouldn’t want to be known as a
Pollyannist. Still, I think it’s an obligation to be firm with these laws.
We should have separate jails for Murphy's Law breakers. Or maybe
we can stuff them on the shuttle and leave them on the moon.
If this becomes practice (and it probably will since I
mentioned it), I think I'm going to break the law of Mr. Murphy so that I can
ride aboard the shuttle. While a ride on the shuttle is not worth the sacrifice
of having to spend the rest of my life on the desolate moon, I figure it is
worth the chance of trying to take over the flight and change courses. Success
would mean spending the rest of my life on one of the sunny Venusian beaches.
I really do need to take a trip. A long trip. Maybe around
the world; or at least around the block. Maybe if I just walked around the room
a few times.
I need change… I have a dollar, but I want a gumball. That's
the way life is; you can have more or less than you want, but never exactly
what you want. Like that old ancient saying goes:
"You can't always get what
you want, but if you try sometime, you get what you need."
Was it John Wayne or Mick Jaeger who said that?
"The grass is always
greener on the side of the fence without the dogs…"
"A bird in the hand is
worth two in the bush, unless you're a bird watcher."
— Sayings from the book of Rhumit.
Actually I could never leave my humble abode (be it ever so
humble.) I am truly a homebody, or is that a homely body?...
Change can be upsetting, disorienting, and yet unavoidable. In
school I hated changing classes between periods, even when I was leaving
classes I hated. I like my moods evened out throughout the course of a day. If
I start out feeling miserable at the start of a day I would just as soon stay
miserable throughout the rest of the day. I hate up and down days, like school
used to be — good class, bad class, good class… I hate that! Why can't the
educators even things out by making everything either all good or all bad. I
would prefer not to have them all be somewhere in-between, because that would
be too boring. It's fun to cry about how much you hate something, or even, once
in awhile, exclaim how you enjoy something. But what's there to say about
something that's average? And I don't mean average in the way the critics use
the term, when they say a movie or play was average, they really mean to say it
was bad. Because after almost every movie a critic rates as average, he or she
strings out a long list of shortcomings. Now you know, that after so much
interjection and thought going onto ways to tear someone apart, he or she must
have had fun.
The way you can really tell a movie is average is when it is
just called "average," and there is nothing else. There is nothing to
say about something that is really average. So average is boring, worse than
bad, and even worse than good. It leaves you with nothing to reminisce upon. Nothing
to sharpen your claws, and polish your verbal expletives on.
How about the average teacher? Does the average teacher
really do more harm than good? The average teacher bores his students and leaves
them with nothing to say, so they go away empty, which many of our children do
today. This empty is bad. Sometimes empty can be good, because it is usually
the want of mankind to fill anything that's empty. Empty is incompleteness. As
the young person steps out into the world, empty of experience, sometimes this
rawness, this emptiness, leads to bold intentions and radical conclusions.
Before the mind is shaped in conventional ways, this is the time when all great
geniuses make their most significant gifts to mankind. When the mind is full of
traditional rationale, no new abstract thinking will tend to enter. It's in the
process of filling that mind when all the great revelations occur. In this
manner, it is usually the young mind, the empty mind, which is the best. The
young mind cannot fall back on past experiences and so does not readily fall
into the ruts of conventional thinking. If that young mind happens to be that
of a genius, then it can lead to uncharted territory and break-through for the
enlightenment of all mankind.
But a bored mind, empty or full, can only lead to
stagnation. Education is not a joy to the student of an average teacher, so
although that student may possess the potential skills to make that bold step
to a level higher than the typical person, he never feels the urge to, that
hungry desire that is so necessary has not been honed. If a hungry child, bored
with the daily feedings of oatmeal, had a choice between eating oatmeal or going
to bed hungry, I would pick a short bedtime story. Bored minds lose their
hunger for knowledge.
You might say a bad teacher can only be worse. He leaves
students with a bitter taste in their mouths. But herein lies the difference
between bad and average; when something has left you with no taste, you don't
search for that experience again. In this same way, the bored mind no longer
searches for more knowledge. But how long would that same person leave a bad
taste in their mouth? Most likely they will search for something to eradicate
that bad taste. A pupil who has had a bad experience in class is left
frustrated, angry – with a bad taste in his mouth. After a while he looks for
something to change that frustration, search for something to rid his mouth of
that bitter taste. The only thing that can change his distorted or misguided
knowledge is clear insight into more reliable knowledge. Truth as opposed to
lies, but the teacher doesn't have to lie to be unfit, better yet--
enlightenment as opposed to confusion. When the mind is confused it searches for
logical paths to sort out the confusion and make sense of small parts of the total
picture, even if the picture, as a whole, is incomprehensible. The student
might take it a bit slower the next time around, sorting information bit by
bit, instead of in confusing lumps. But for him there will be a next time.
Most people, when turned off by a religion or even diocese
will go find another and not just give up on God, knowing that it’s the
frailties of man that can distort the views of the big picture, even when the
big picture itself has never changed.
The divorcee is always most vulnerable to another romance
right after the separation. Is that because the divorcee is looking for another
bad experience? Of course not, but they are looking to right a wrong. When
you've had a bad love affair you search desperately for a good one.
But wouldn't it be best to have that original love be good?
Isn't the same true for teachers?
Teachers are all-important. Even when they are on strike they are teaching... They have a direct hand upon our
future. Teaching is more important for us than anything else, for it is what
separates us from the insects. It is what led us to the present day, modern
world. The building of knowledge through teaching. I don't need to be an Einstein
to use his equations, because they were taught to me. I didn't have to try to
work them out myself with an inferior mind to that of Mr. Einstein. I didn't
have to invent and design my typewriter to be able to make use of it, either
did the company who made it. That knowledge was passed down to them, leaving
room and time for them to make improvements on the original and thus making a
better product. The automobile is the classic example of an accumulation of
many individual inventions all put together into one package that without any
one of the many would not lead to the same final product.
Teaching doesn't start in the classroom (At least not in Strongsville.) From the moment a
child is born he is learning and being taught and influenced by everyone around
him. His brain is forming and growing from the start. Even the best teacher can
only do so much when there is no cooperation from home. Parents should be aware
of what
goes on inside their children's school and classes. Parents
should take heed in pointing out the fact that they believe a teacher to be
bad. This doesn’t mean that they should automatically take the child’s side,
because many times today I see the parents defending their child’s bad behavior
and this only teaches their child that bad behavior is acceptable. The parents
have much more influence over their children than can one “bad” teacher can
have. Let them know that there are good teachers out there, and help guide them
when they most need to have a good experience in education. I think a good
teacher is delighted to have parents take a constructive interest in their
children's learning.
And if a teacher is boring your child, rescue him from the
sea of tranquility (No – Don’t send him to the moon!) but show him that
learning can be a wonderful, almost magical, experience. Learning can be fun.
Otherwise mankind would have never made it this far.
Teach your children well … (Please don’t Nash your teeth Mr. Graham)
Sincerely,
èim
Uhr
P.S. A single cell in the brain may have
direct contact with
1,000 others. A
single teacher reaches
1,000's of
young minds …
