Teaching offers rewards, frustration

My first job out of college was teaching junior high social studies in Charlottesville. It was hard work. The students didn't care if they knew anything at all about Virginia history, U.S. history or world cultures, my three class assignments. I knocked myself out trying to make the material fascinating, which I happen to think it is. They were not all that impressed.

There was an air of hostility that didn't sit well with me. I was used to gentler ways than their loud, aggressive style.

I actually liked a lot of the students, and if I could have worked with them in much smaller groups, I might have been delighted to teach them, but you put 25 of them in a room with one adult, and the misery multiplies. The young, idealistic teachers seem to be the first to go down. I guess they thought their jobs would be like those movies about charismatic teachers who win over the tough kids. When their best efforts were not met with appreciation, they got depressed. I remember a smart math teacher just out of a select university who spent his third teaching year taking the kids out to fly kites. He had had it. I saw two grown men cry. I cried once myself.

I was young, but not all that idealistic, so I wasn't surprised that it was so hard, but after three years, I called it quits. The last straw was when a ninth-grader I taught single-handedly started a small riot. During a school football game she went around sticking people with a hat pin. This somehow led to fights. The fights moved from the stands to the parking lot to the street. The police came. I didn't actually see any of this, but I decided enough was enough. When the school gave each teacher who was leaving a present, I told them I should be giving them presents. They were the ones who had to stay. That school had some of the finest teachers I could ever imagine collected together under one public school roof, but I was not destined to remain among them.

I read that Virginia has a shortage of teachers partly because about half of them quit within five years. Having been one of them, I understand, but every once in a while I get the itch to try it again. I am much older now, know more, am more confident. I would do better this time, wouldn't I-

My children emphatically tell me that I would not, that my fantasies of teaching are just that: fantasies. They describe the teachers they remember as more exhausted than fulfilled, but they could be wrong.

The problems of the public schools have been analyzed endlessly for decades. Books and more books have been written. Dedicated people with vast experience don't have all the answers, and I certainly don't either, but I do know that people who teach well are a treasure and deserve our gratitude and our money. Children who want to learn are treasures as well.

One student I taught all those years ago has remained my all-time intellectual hero. Joette Timberlake was a ninth-grader. School did not come easy to her. She had to work at it. I must have used my Time-Life book on the world's great religions in my world cultures class because Joette saw it and asked to borrow it. This thing was huge. It had glossy pictures and descriptions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and maybe others as well. In each section it had pages and pages of text from the sacred scriptures of each faith. It was a lot to tackle.

Joette Timberlake took it home, and I forgot she even had it. One day she brought it back and thanked me for letting her borrow it. She had read the entire book. She simply wanted to know about religions. She slogged through page by page until she was done. I know people with Ph.D.'s who have less intellectual curiosity than that young girl. 

Education today has come to be mostly job preparation, probably because making a living has not been this hard since before World War II. Plenty of people with college degrees are simply not making it financially, but I hope the sheer joy of learning doesn't vanish in the headlong scramble to land a job with health insurance and a living wage.

Patricia Hunt is a Mary Baldwin College chaplain and Staunton resident.