Why I Love Teaching
Teacher Challenges: Why I love Teaching Anyway
Teaching isn’t easy. Some of the many challenges are ten-to-twelve-hour days (and all day Saturday), politics, enabling parents, long lines to the one-stall bathroom during the seven-minute break, the “duty-free” lunch during which you do everything except eat (detentions, tutorials, make-up tests), lack of sleep, stress, countless hours of brutal essay-correcting.
So, why do I love teaching? I will probably give you the same answer as a parent would; it brings me so much joy. More specifically, the students themselves bring me joy.
For example, today, when I was teaching the future tense, I put sentence stems with an infinitive on the Power Point. Students had to complete the sentences using the future tense. One sentence stem was, “En diez años, la maestra no / poder…”
Students wrote many amusing sentences, “No podrá enseñar”, “No, podrá ver”, “No podrá oír”. As I scanned the room, reading their white boards, I was chuckling to myself until I came to the last boy in the last row. He had written, “La maestra ya no podrá darme una F.” I was laughing so hard it took me a while to compose myself and get back to teaching.
Why do I teach? My students are my children. They are inspired, hilarious, full of life, curious, and never dull. I am truly fulfilled. Now I am going to go disintegrate into a heap in my favorite chair.
No, I think I’ll go straight to bed.
I would love to hear about what some of your students have done to keep you smiling on the job. If you like I’ll add your stories to mine in my blog. Comment in the comments section below.
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Would you like an interactive notebook activity to keep your students hands-on as they are learning the future and conditional tenses?
How about a TPR story for the conditional tense?
Teaching the expressions for, “To become” takes students far in the quest to become more proficient. My students really enjoyed this TPR Story and it provided a ton of repetition in context.
