Encouraging words from a student

I'm teaching English in a Korean middle school these days. A student of mine recently caught up to me in the hallway and said she doesn't like English but she does enjoy my classes. Encouraging words for a teacher to hear.

All teachers need encouragement of this kind, and very many deserve it. The student who spoke to me in the hallway not only made my day but also helped me see my teaching experience as thoroughly worthwhile. Some days it doesn't feel that way. Some days it feels as if I'm spinning my wheels and accomplishing next to nothing in the classroom.

Make no mistake: teaching is hard, draining work. Done at one's leisure, just as one person sharing knowledge with others, teaching may be great fun. But as daily grinds go, schoolteaching isn't especially easy or pleasant. Take it from me, a career computer programmer trying teaching for the first time after a dozen years at a large corporation.

Frankly speaking, I've come to sympathize with teachers who mail it in. (I don't know any such teachers personally, mind you, but I sympathize with them wherever they may be.) I don't condone laxity, but I understand. Teaching classes packed with oh so many students, hour after hour and day after day, invites a method of operation akin to that of a factory worker: going through the motions, watching the clock, waiting for the bell, letting your mind go slack in the routine of it all. All teachers face the temptation to lecture mechanically and get class over with. Good teachers resist the temptation.

Even so, teachers who teach just to bring home a paycheck, without feeling inspired—either from the get-go or after being worn down by long hard years—aren't villains in my book. While it's true that teachers who are chronically demoralized and/or ineffective should find another line of work, the same can be said of people in all sorts of jobs and professions.

I'm a full-time teacher now. I understand, indeed I rue, the hardships teachers face. I feel the stresses and strains myself. I myself sometimes mail it in. I'm loath to have my teaching performance evaluated; it seems arbitrary and unfair. And I agree that the general public doesn't sufficiently respect the hard work that teachers do.

But at the same time, I don't support the glorification of schoolteaching. Good teachers need not be unusually noble or selfless; there's no call for heaping fulsome praise on teachers in general. Neither is teaching as critical as advertised, given that bright students learn no matter how superb or lousy their teachers are.

Teaching is hard work, yes, but it's far from the sophisticated intellectual challenge that some "education professionals" make it out to be. Teaching at the primary or secondary level is not work I would recommend to someone super-analytical who relishes intellectual nuance and wishes to operate in an antiseptic professional environment. But I just might recommend it to someone smart, bold yet tenderhearted, and able to get used to anything.

I applaud those who embark on, or stick with, a career in teaching. It's not an easy road, but there are rewards aplenty along the way, none greater than encouraging words from a student.