and thought it would be easy. I was naïve to everything that teaching in America entails and realized early on that my idea of teaching was seen through rose-colored glasses. After two years of college classes, my rose-colored glasses have been retinted, and my desire to teach has only strengthened. I now want to teach not because it is easy but precisely because it is challenging, requires intelligence, is one of the most important jobs one can do, and I believe I am capable of being a good teacher. And good teachers are very much needed.
There is a common misconception in American society that teaching is easy. The first thing that I quickly realized when I really started learning about teaching is that it is not easy. I know that this seems obvious, but for many, it is not. When I was in high school, I ran a volunteer program where high school musicians weekly went and taught young children how to play instruments. I thoroughly enjoyed doing this, but the mention of pursuing music education as a career was treated by my high school teachers as a horrible decision that they needed to steer me away from. It seemed preposterous to them that one of their star students would give up their promising future of being a doctor or scientist to instead be a music educator. Even the music educators that I interacted with would be quick to name all the negatives of their own careers in order to save the naïve high schooler from following in their footsteps. Teachers themselves tell students who are high achievers in school that teaching is beneath them. This frequently seemed counterintuitive to me. Why would teachers insult their own profession? Why would they lower the standards for future teachers? Why would they demean themselves in this way? As Meier (2000) expresses, “What kid, after all, wants to be seen emulating people he’s been told are too dumb to exercise power, and are simply implementing the commands of the real experts” (p. 15). This led me to not really know what I wanted to do after high school because teaching had been made out to be a career I should not go near.
About the time that I was busy procrastinating with my college applications, I received a phone call from a Marine Corps recruiter wanting to talk with my twin brother. Thankfully for me, my brother was not home and I quickly became hooked on the idea of becoming a Marine Corps musician. This decision came with the voices of many more teachers, each of whom felt compelled to tell me that I would be wasting my intellect if I joined the military and played an instrument. I even had one English teacher who insisted I needed to write a spoken-word poem about departing for college despite the fact that this was not my plan. Instead, I wrote a critique aimed at my teachers that explained why they should be advocating for their students’ happiness and success, instead of pushing college like it was the only option to succeed.
In the Marine Corps, I was surprised to find that the band field was filled with many former music educators. They too were quick to demean the profession and speak of it as a waste of time. I was told daily by my fellow Marine musicians who had left the education sector that it was the last thing they would ever go back to doing. I frequently heard about how if I was smart I would not become a teacher. I respected my fellow Marines more than my former teachers, and their daily critique of their former profession slowly wore me down to view teaching as a career that garnered little respect and was not worth doing if you were smart enough to do something else. This idea that you need not be smart to teach seems to stem from the misconception that teaching is easy.
Now that I’ve learned more about teaching, I question how anyone can see it as easy. Valle and Connor (2011) describe teaching as “a complex act that requires constant shifting among multiple and simultaneous skill sets” (p. 2). Teaching not only requires one to know content but also how to teach that material to a wide range of learners all while managing a classroom full of diverse individuals who may or may not be developmentally ready to learn that content. Moreover, at times teachers need to act as stand-in parents, nurses, janitors, and even bodyguards. There is nothing easy about any of this, and to say that it is beneath those who are smart is diminishing the many different kinds of skills and intelligences that teachers use daily to complete their jobs. I want to teach because it is so difficult.
I can now admit that if my naïve idea that teaching was easy had been true, I would not have wanted to continue pursuing it as my career path. The short hiatus I took after leaving the Marine Corps made me long to return to something that demanded more from me. I was actually relieved to discover that teaching would not be an easy task. To many of my fellow classmates, the revelation that I enjoy the challenge is shocking to them. In contrast, it surprises me that all people pursuing a degree in education don’t share the same outlook. Teaching is extremely hard, and I feel it is important for teachers entering the profession to have a strong desire to embrace that challenge. If teachers enter the profession without wanting to be challenged, they will frequently become script readers who do the bare minimum.
You may wonder why being a script reader is such a bad thing. After all, there are few teachers who would not jump at the chance to have a classroom management and instruction plan that was guaranteed to work for every one of our students. This does not exist. I am confident that it never will. The students in our classrooms are not robots, which is why there will never be a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching that will actually work. Sadly, the American education system is becoming increasingly like a factory where the instructions for making citizens are uniform, test-focused, and narrow in their focus. Such a focus removes all the joy from both student and teacher. As Meier (2000) reminds both aspiring and in-service teachers, a script provides no room for “whimsical discoveries and unexpected learnings” (p. xi). While reading from a script is easy, it is not teaching. In part, this is true because even the best scripts rarely reflect teaching practices supported by science, and they rarely account for the numerous other roles that a teacher must take on in the classroom. Even if the best scripts aligned with what the science of teaching tells us is most important—that is, they focused on student discovery and engagement—they would still fall short because there is more to good teaching than scientifically supported “best practice.” As Ohanian (2013) observes, “Teaching is too personal, even too metaphysical, to be charted like the daily temperature” (pp. 122–123). Of course, teaching is a science. But it is also an art.
Teachers need to be willing to face the challenge of creating their own dynamic lessons and need to be strong enough to turn away from the lure of the easy one-size-fits-all scripted instruction. This is why I view wanting to be challenged as a reason to teach, because without that desire it would be all too easy to comply with the standardized scripts. Teachers need to embrace the challenge for the benefit of the students; if they don’t want to be challenged then they shouldn’t be teaching.
The desire to be challenged, however, is not sufficient and does not constitute, by itself, a strong enough reason to teach. Teachers must also be intellectuals. This starts with teachers viewing themselves as scholars—of students and their development, of art, science, literature, mathematics, and history—who see themselves as something more than information dispensers, agreeing to pass their days by filling empty vessels. Teacher work needs to be examined “as a form of intellectual labor” (Giroux, 2013, p. 193). If we continue to act as though teaching does not require someone to be an intellectual we will further devalue teachers, and teaching and the education of children and young people will continue its mundane downfall. Being an intellectual does not mean that one needs to be a genius as defined by a test in order to teach. Instead it means that you must be knowledgeable; you must seek knowledge, possess many skills, and be continuously willing to learn from others. Giroux (2013) states the case most strongly and emphasizes that teachers need to be transformative intellectuals who “must take active responsibility for raising various questions about what they teach, how they are to teach, and what the larger goals are for which they are striving” (p. 194). It is not enough to be an intellectual; one must also advocate for the continued betterment of America’s education system. My desire to continue to grow intellectually, embrace the intellectual aspects of teaching, and advocate for positive change are also reasons why I want to teach.
Teachers must also have a desire to help children and young people. While teachers are frequently inundated with criticism regarding whether they are actually helping their students, the reality is that “educators often find themselves in
