I am three years into my teaching degree at the moment. This means that after October next year, I will allegedly be fully equipped to be able to teach students ranging from Preps to Year 12s.
This means that in much less than a mere year and a half, assuming that I can land a teaching position, I will be standing in front of the classroom with approximately twenty-five pairs of eyes looking at me, yearning for a role-model, yearning for assistance, for a chance to be heard, for a chance to show their worth. Twenty-five pairs of eyes will look unto me and await my assertion in varied subjects. They will wait for the reinstating of classroom rules, for their chances to introduce themselves to one another, to learn what they do not yet know, to be inspired, to evolve.
But nobody has yet mentioned to me that students need, more than anything else, to confide. It frightens me that in my cohort of fellow pre-service teachers, there are some who cannot even spare ten extra minutes to assist in group assignments. There are some who would not reserve a seat for you if your wheelchair broke, there are some who care not for the quality of learning, let alone the quality of teaching. It frightens me because how then are their students to confide in them? How are students to accept the quality and need for education when some teachers are not willing to offer it?
The worst thing is when I am seated in a lecture or a tutorial and some of my peers behave in the same manner as any bored student would, considering not our lecturer and their attempts to tell us all that they can before we are fully qualified. These same peers would go on to be teachers who enforce the need for the respecting of themselves - how can one acquire respect, though, when they do not themselves give it?
I gained a huge amount of clarity two weeks ago when I was introduced to a new lecturer. She had been teaching in high school for over thirty years, and lecturing for the past six years. "Now it is time for me to have my respect," she said at the beginning of the lesson. I thought nothing of that, until some students began to walk in late. She bucketed down on them like acid rain, demanding a medical slip the next time anyone was late. Those students trembled silently for the remainder of the class. It was a discomforting feeling, being taught by her, but I learnt something from it all - she is right. How then would we be like as educators? Running late because we slept in? What principal would allow us to retain our jobs if we had this attitude flowing from us when we expect it never to come from our students?
Pre-service teachers need to realise the impact they will have on students. Thus far, I have not learnt about any of it in my university setting, rather in school settings. Children notice everything. Sometimes I forget to notice that.
I amuse myself sometimes. Actually, I amuse myself all the time. I also amuse all sorts of people. But more than being amusing, I also am confusing in terms of my divergent nature, how I fall into several descriptors that differ from initial thoughts of me.
The main descriptor that amuses me and confuses others is the fact that I have decided to embark on an educative journey. It is something that most everyone I meet does not expect. In fact, the last thing they would expect me to be on the journey towards being is a teacher, a role model, an educator. The way I talk, the way I behave and the things that I do scream otherwise and it makes it difficult for people to believe me when I claim that my area of interest lies in the world of academia, of learning to learn to teach.
People simply cannot fathom that a person like me who speaks more street-talk than not will be the director of a classroom one day. They then begin to fit the pieces together when I consistently begin to drop words that are too large for them to comprehend, and soon come to the acceptance of the fact that I may lecture their sons and daughters in the near future. And that is what I certainly love most about myself, the fact that I am not who I appear to be. This can go brutally awful, though.
Not in favour of this amusement is the parents of these little people. If a parent saw me at a party, or at the shopping centre or anywhere else I journey through, they will consider me the last person that they would ever want near their child, let alone the last person they want instructing their child. I have befuddled the parents of the students that I work with, though, on my placement rounds. One particular mother became more obsessed with me than her daughter was. I remember sitting at the back of the car on our way home from an abandoned mental asylum and my cousin turned around and asked me, "why is there an Indian lady smiling at you and waving?" It turned out it was her. Her daughter was asleep in the back of her car, so her mother decided to do all of the waving. I rolled down the window and had a miniature conversation with her across two lanes on a main road - it was fantastic!
My mentor teachers also judge me upon my appearance and my quiet nature and my "unwillingness to show initiative". I soon also amuse them when I start teaching, and I have had several occasions where some of my mentors have become jealous of my bond with the students, particularly one from primary school. I cannot help it. I will not compromise my ability to connect with students immediately so as to not make my mentors look bad. I am there to gain experience and I will "show initiative" in my own ways.
And that is what teaching is all about, in my opinion. Being divergent. I could not care what the educator of my children will look like, smell like nor would I care that they enjoy listening to rap music and swearing a little too much in each sentence that they say. What I care about is their ability to connect with my child so as to allow my child to confide with them on an educative basis. And that is who I am for children that I teach. Parents need to judge based on practice not on physical presentation.
So I felt a little discontent today after seeing the faces of my peers as they found out that I was amongst another two in a class of about thirty who had read the entirety of Toni Morrison's Tar Baby. I laughed this fact off calling myself a 'geek' and so did they.
Is it fair that I call myself such a name? I mean, sure the term 'geek' is kind of cool but it has, attached to it, a stigma associated with the negative shade of the word itself. I think the fact that I stayed up until four in the morning and that I still did not manage to finish reading the book but read the rest of it on the toilet therefore leading me to rush to uni, just so I can assist my torturous teacher in discussing this set class text so as to not leave her floored, per se, like she is in every other class due to the fact that hardly anybody reads the set texts, is rather sacrificial of me than 'geeky' yet to appeal to conformity I applied the latter.
It bothers me how crucial I am to myself in every aspect. I do not see myself the way I wish others would see me and I think that is a big problem, due to the fact of being falsely read by all those who I have come across thus far. Though I do label myself these derogatory terms, I still see the good in myself and unfortunately the bad in others, which is diminished by my humanly needs to communicate and to feel. In my communicative endeavours though I have found that I am lacking. I do not say all that I feel needs to be said due to my fear of denial, my fear of rejection, of having to find and to fall all over again and that is what stops me.
Yes, to risk is to live but to risk only to fall and break constantly shatters one's psyche. Mine is shattered to the point where I wish for others to come in yet I cannot bear closeness in fear of having their absence like the absence of everyone else from my life. In reading alone I have found stigmas tainting my entirety and it is frightening. I only hope that one day my mind is number enough so as to not feel these stigmas anymore, so as to see these stigmas as something unique, something of a utopian layer meshed into myself. I sacrificed my sleeping pattern which I had, the previous night, worked so hard to rebuild. And all this for a discussion with myself, really, for I do not deem my teacher adequate enough to converse with me.
The imagery I bring up from set texts astounds my teacher and leads her to ask other people who had previously confessed that they have not read the book as of yet even though the class presently required them to have at least done so before attending. She would rather watch someone else conjure up meanings that they are unaware of just to hide her unawareness of what I say, and like the 'geek' that I label myself I stutter and I cut off what I am saying so as to not further complicate things for her, apparently it is too difficult to think at my rate - and to think that nobody had picked up the fact that there was a mango on the front cover which indicated class distinction further discontented me. It is things like these which lead me to believe that my entire life has a stigma behind it. That like my teacher for this class, nobody else truly will be able to understand the complexity that is me.
I have developed my way of speaking now so that I sound more academic, more like I mean something important only to be ignored or in some cases mocked. And that is saddening, to see future scholars like myself being disregarded in this daily rat race. People would rather inquire into the lives of faux celebrities than real life inspiring role models. Nobody asks for my opinions anymore, and I am pretty sure it is because they have reached the level of complexity that rarely anyone wishes to encounter.
Though this is a sad truth, this is my reality. Now, I carry on onto the next novel, three times the size of Tar Baby and I will again have to face the stigma behind the word 'geek' and watch people's reactions as I perform to their alleged expectations, only to baffle them entirely. As for the text, I would like to publicly apologize on behalf of the twenty or so students in my class who enrolled to read and do not - forgive them for they cannot strain their thinking of clubbing and whatnot. Tar Baby is a superb read, one that I recommend.
