My father once said of farming, “It’s not a bad life, but it’s a sh***y living.” Of teaching, I might say the inverse. While no one’s going to become fabulously wealthy as a teacher. The roughly $3K a month you can make teaching full-time is a pretty decent living. Maybe less so as the sole provider for a family of four, but definitely more than enough for a confirmed bachelor like yours truly. The life of a teacher, however…

I was rounding out my elementary years when my mother got her degree and began teaching. In fact, when we moved to a new school, she got her first job as an English teacher. My English teacher, in fact. She later transitioned into reading (our school system kept English and reading separate at the lower levels, though I know some schools bundle them together–I happened to briefly work at one such school). I saw what it did to her. She didn’t make it to retirement. She finally had her fill after some 13 or 14 years and became a nurse. She warned me not to become a teacher and I honestly didn’t have any plans of doing so, but my first trip to Japan changed all that. While I can hardly claim the title of Great Teacher Carmack, I seemed to have a knack for it and teaching is stable work, just the sort of thing to prop me up while I work on my writing.

Being an ALT in Japan, you’re shielded from a lot of what being a real teacher means and once you get a taste of it, you can lose your appetite really quickly. After returning to the States, I took up a job as a 6th grade reading and language arts teacher. The problem was that I was in perhaps the worst middle school of a pretty bad town. It was an unmitigated nightmare. I quit after just one week. I knew my body would give out in a month’s time and it wasn’t worth it. Ever since my time in the Army, I vowed not to stick with a miserable situation so long as I had the means to escape it. I won’t go into the details, at least not at this time, but it was pretty terrible.

Things picked up for me after that. I landed a slot teaching ESL at a nearby university and did fairly well there until my position was eliminated. We had last year’s fiasco in Tokyo and then I was lucky enough to get on as adjunct faculty at two local community colleges. Though not unbearable, it highlighted what’s terrible about teaching, so I opted out of continuing into this semester. Instead I’m transitioning into private tutoring and yesterday’s lesson really highlighted what’s great about teaching. Let’s review the two sides of the fence.

Administrative bullcrap is probably the worst thing about teaching. The tangled web of politics, liability and busywork is positively soul-crushing and contributes next to nothing to the educational process. As an ALT, you’re completely shielded from the admin side of teaching and that can warp your perspective on the profession. It’s a lot of hassle and if the administrative personnel don’t have your back, it’s a straight-up nightmare.

The second part of what’s terrible about teaching (and this tends to have an unholy symbiotic relationship with the first part) is the unfortunate product of compulsory education (either by law or parental fiat): students who don’t want to learn. Yes, people will go on for days about the job of the teacher to motivate his kiddos, but if someone doesn’t want to learn, there’s not a whole lot a teacher can do to change that. Students who don’t want to learn are the ones you can expect to be disruptive, shoot your overall classroom averages straight to Hell, and have the shrillest and most unreasonable parents. Frankly, if a student doesn’t want to learn, he shouldn’t be in the classroom. Put him to work in the salt mines of Kessel for all I care. Teaching in college largely eliminates the issues of classroom disruption (because you can just kick the little miscreants out) and parental involvement (thanks to FERPA), but you still have to deal with failures bringing you down.

There are, of course, other factors that make teaching terrible, especially at the lower levels, such as overcrowded classrooms and the idiotic trend of teaching these rock-stupid standardized tests rather than actually educating students (a rant for another day), but the above two are what really make the job distasteful for me.

With all this talk about what makes teaching so terrible, why am I still at it? Well, let me tell ya, when you actually have a student who wants to learn, who’s putting out the effort to absorb what you have to impart, it’s like magic. There are few things as rewarding as watching a student progress. Maybe it’s because I’m an insufferable know-it-all, but I love sharing my knowledge and experience with others. This is what makes private tutoring so great, especially for adult learners. They’re there because they want it and they’re going to put out the necessary effort to get where they need to be. Are there going to be some bumps along the way? Sure, but there’s no administrative nonsense bogging you down and you don’t have the distraction of students who don’t want to learn. It’s good stuff.

I’ve recently begun teaching Japanese to a couple that’s wanting to spend a little time in sunny Nippon and even a single lesson has buoyed my spirits in a way that classroom instruction never could. Oh, I won’t deny that the repressed showman in me enjoys performing for a crowd, but as a teacher, I want my lessons to actually stick and this private tutoring thing seems to be the way to go. Now if I can just build my client list a little more lest I repeat last year’s experience in Tokyo. ^_^;