Educational Series, Pt. I - Why Teachers Matter

I have had a few different thoughts recently about why having good teachers matters. Today's blog is going to cover engagement, interest, and careers.

I have always been good at math and science. Loved chemistry and physics! In high school, I knew I was going to be an engineer. I applied to two colleges--MIT and Purdue. My SATs weren't quite enough for MIT, but I was accepted to Purdue either right before or a few days into my senior year. My physics teacher my junior year was amazing. We made holograms! He was funny, and he made the material interesting. I became his student helper my last year in school.

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When I arrived at Purdue, the freshman engineering classes were huge. We had chemistry in the auditorium where concerts were held so there was room for all 300+ of us. I was a number and excelling was all on me. I had always been self-motivated, but there was no way to get to know most of my professors. My math professor spoke English as a second language. He was probably brilliant, but I had difficulty understanding him, let alone the math concepts he was trying to impart.

And my physics professor was boring and generally the caricature of a socially inept scientist. He did the experiment where you sit in a chair and hold a spinning bicycle wheel and move the wheel to spin in a different direction. He hit himself in the head with the wheel, which caused him combover to flop over and not get fixed the entire lecture. But he was the better physics professor. The other one only taught in the spring semester, always failed most of his class, and was put on teaching probation each fall because of it.

Photo Credit: Hal Gatewood (@halgatewood)

I get that freshman engineering is something of a weed-out program. But making us hate math and science seems to be the wrong way to go about it. Since I'm not an engineer, it should come as no surprise that I quit the engineering program after the first year. I switched my major to psychology. I can't tell you how many people told me (and my parents) what a mistake I was making because I was now getting "a chick degree" and there was more money to be made in engineering. But it was too late. I had lost the fire for physics and calculus and moved on to statistics and psychological experimentation.

But I'm not a psychologist either. As much as I enjoyed the material, I am an empath, and counseling people would have crushed me. I would have taken things on and taken things home, and it would have been a disaster waiting to happen. After I changed to a liberal arts school, which had more options for my degree, I added a minor in criminal justice. I took amazing classes in the history and sociology departments. I had at least three history classes that were taught as law classes, where we had to memorize cases and explain their application to hypothetical situations on exams. I LOVED those.

Color me surprised that there were any history classes I liked. See, with the exception of my World History and US History classes in high school, I abhorred history. Avoided it like the plague. Every World History class started with the Fertile Crescent and made it to Rome by the year's end. Every US History class started with the Revolutionary War and ended around the Civil War. In High School, we managed to avoid this pattern and learn more modern history. I found the depression and Watergate fascinating. I was intrigued by how much religion played a part in World History. But it had never been taught in a way that was engaging or interesting.

I will now share some embarrassing information with you. In my 20s and 30s, my husband and I would play "I or II." He would name a leader or important figure or country and I had to say if it was WWI or WWII. I knew Hitler and Churchill and Japan and the big ones, but otherwise, I was wrong. A lot. The information *never* stayed. I could memorize facts and figures and keep them for a school year, but they inevitably fell out because there was nothing to hang them on in my brain.

But stories? Stories stay with me. That's why I was great at law school and am successful at my paying job. Cases are simply stories. Facts that make skeletons to hang cases on. Turns out, historical fiction is the same. Even biographies work depending on how they are written. I can do research after and find out what pieces of the story were true and now have a way to hang onto the facts because of how they impacted the characters' lives.

Maybe I was always going to end up a lawyer. Maybe I would have left engineering at some point even if I had good professors. I'll never know. What I do know, is that teachers and professors who engaged me are the ones I learned the most from. When learning was fun, interesting, and practical, I soaked it in like a sponge. But all of my elementary and middle school history teachers were coaches who had been hired for sports; not people who had studied history or had any idea how to make it interesting. So I missed out. I am learning a lot as an adult, which pleases me. But I wish I had learned a lot of this back then so I would have an even broader, richer knowledge now on which to build.

My brother and my brother-in-law both teach in high schools. Physics and history, respectively. When I hear what and how they teach their classes, I wish I had more teachers like them. I have a lot more to say about them in Part 2. But for now, I want to focus on the fact that they have found ways to engage their students, keep them interested, show their students that physics and history are relevant in everyday life, and make learning fun.

To me, these are the marks of a good teacher. And I was blessed to have many. But it makes the others stand out even more by comparison. I want my kid--and all kids--to love school. To be excited about learning. To have teachers who show them the world in new ways and teach them how to learn and think critically, so when they find the thing that sparks joy inside them that they want to do to earn a living, they have the tools to do just that.

So, no more hiring teachers just because they can coach. Hire them because they can teach! (Or even so both! My HS physics teacher was also a basketball coach! It's possible to do both well.) Students deserve teachers who want to be there and want them to learn. Let's make sure we give them that gift. It will make a huge difference in a short time.