When I was in preschool I wanted to be a teacher. I also wanted to be a tree doctor, but I soon gave that one up because, well, what was I thinking- tree doctor...? The teacher thing stayed with me on and off until about middle school. I liked education, I was a smart kid, since I was a kid I liked being with kids, and heck, I already knew more than a lot of my teachers (Greenland is not a continent no matter what your second grade teacher may have tried to convince you, and the definition of plural is not two or more).
Then I hit middle school and realised that being a teacher meant trying to teach some of the idiots that were in my sixth grade classes. It meant dealing with ridiculous, irate parents. It meant working with administration members. It meant a shitload more than teaching smart kids how to be smarter.
I go to a uni that specialises in turing out education majors. Every now and again someone from home (usually a distant relative or one of my former teachers) finds out where I go and asks me if I want to be a teacher. I laugh and say no, no, a thousand times no.
Today I was reminded of the biggest reason. Nathan and I are both taking the German. We do the homework together, he has been in class every single day I've been there. There is no reason he should not know every little bit of German just as well as I do. I have an A, and he has a D. This is why I cannot teach. I cannot understand how you can be in the class, do the stuff, and still not have the foggiest fucking idea what to do on the test.
I have heard all of this "teaching styles" stuff and about how some people are visual and some people are practical. Curiously, I've never met anyone with any real justification for being one or the other. It's like diagnosing yourself with small pox even though you don't know whether you actually have the symptoms or if maybe you have chicken pox instead. All you know is that you heard somebody talk about small pox and show you pictures of a person with spots on them, so you figure that's what you have. So, how do you ram knowledge into a person's brain?
I seem to soak things up like a sponge. I read things and remember them, I do things and remember them, I see things and remember them. I don't find that I have to process information in any way. Like in Rohld Dahl's Matilda, when Miss Honey asks Matilda how she can do such difficult mathematics and the girl can't explain know how she does it, she just does. (The one and only thing about that book I like, Matilda is an odd child for a genius- more like an encyclopeadia and a calculator than anything else. She can answer questions spot on, but I wonder how much conceptual understanding she has, and why there are so many things she fails to put together.)
How do people who are not me learn? That is the understanding teachers have to have, and I doubt that many of them really do. What learning can and can't we do? Why does Nathan know so much about WWII and nothing about German? I don't know where these sorts of things occur, and how.
I wish I could find something so I know a little better how I might go about trying to teach him the entire second chapter today and tomorrow for the test on Friday.