An Educators Influence

While I read through Baldwin's A Talk to Teachers and Smith's James Baldwin’s Lesson for Teachers in a Time of Turmoil I was drawing connections back to my own experiences and thought about my teachers. Some were unfortunately not really memorable while others I think of as a great influence on my education and outside of the classroom. They were teachers who truly cared for how would turn out in the future. So it leads to the question of what goes into making a great teacher and mentor versus another who simply follows the system for the salary and paycheck (as it is also their livelihood they need to worry about).

Teachers who try and integrate real world applications and knowledge into the lesson plans are what I think makes up a part of being a good teacher and mentor. Smiths states "I realized that rigorous lessons were not mutually exclusive from culturally and politically relevant ones." He recognized that there is more to teaching than simply the numbers and scores of the students. If we were to only focus on the numbers, the students would then be educated ignorantly. Completely and utterly unaware of the world around them and only focused on bringing results. They will not be able to develop themselves and learn about the world for themselves and whichever path they may take. To be raised in the system only to go out into the real world into another system of corporate and numbers. Take this quote from Baldwin, "All this enters the child’s consciousness much sooner than we as adults would like to think it does. As adults, we are easily fooled because we are so anxious to be fooled. But children are very different. Children, not yet aware that it is dangerous to look too deeply at anything, look at everything, look at each other, and draw their own conclusions." As students, we often don't question many things, we are told to learn this subject, do this assignment and turn it in, we simply follow the system. We place our trust in the teacher to teach us what we need for our future. But are they teaching us in conjunction for the real world or are they simply teaching for the sake of scores and their salary. 

I often think about the teachers I've had every since I've went to school. Some were sticklers for the rules and order, some were apathetic, and some cared about the students education and tried their best to propel them in their own ways. I recognize that a fair amount of them taught for the sake of a paycheck, a means for money. One teacher I clearly remember and hold great disdain for was a music teacher in high school. He only cared about the talented musicians in his band classes, so usually the first couple seats. I had the great misfortune of taking his music history class, general music. All he would do is give us a textbook and read from it. Other times he would simply put on a dull documentary that would put anyone in a 50 feet radius to sleep. I did not learn or retain anything useful from that class. But then there was my science teacher who taught their class extremely well and I hold a lot of respect for what she has taught me and the way she does it. The fact of the matter is how did they influence us as people and as students. One class where I spent a school years worth of time and it taught me nothing I would remember and did not help me understand the world around me. The other combined the learning of science along with learning about the real world that we all reside in. Educators are a big influence on children and how they will grow into the world, we should not only teach them basic subjects. But also combine it with learning about the world outside of school culturally and politically.