Harriet Watson's "So, You're a Teacher?"

With an engineer’s precision, my dad performs the one handed shuffle with our gin rummy cards. He doesn’t look at the cards or at me as he asks question he already knows the answers to. "You’ve ruled out mechanical engineering?" I wonder if he regrets giving me his ancient prized slide rule for a high school graduation present. ""Electrical engineering?" The cards continue to fly into his cupped hand—shush, shush, shush. I’m his fifth child and last hope to follow in his large footsteps. He begins to deal the cards and I realize he’s reluctantly accepted my career choice—""At least be a sanitation engineer!" My dad is the first and most important person I’ve disappointed by becoming a teacher, but not the last. At an all-class high school reunion several years into my brilliant career, I am pleased to share the hotel banquet table with my favorite biology teacher. Nancy not only shared her enthusiasm for her subject, but took us on numerous rips to lakes, snowy mountains, and wild shorelines, and into the undeveloped areas around the school to explore with the neighborhood "Euell Gibbons", an elderly man who knew all about the edible and medicinal local flora. Nancy hasn’t changed much in the 15 years since I’ve seen her—curly brown hair making a halo round her face only just beginning to show silver highlights, wire-rimmed glasses still the same. Nancy pushes fruit salad around her plate with her fork and looks curiously around the room, tables full of 20-, 30- and 40-somethings. "I can’t believe so many of you became teachers. Couldn’t you find anything important or interesting to do with your lives?" I can’t believe she thinks her work, helping young people learn about the world around them and how to live in it, wasn’t interesting or important. Nancy turns to the redheaded woman next to her, whose career choice she approves of—traveling saleswoman for Kodak film. During my life as a teacher, I’ve encountered other attitudes. Although my dad would consider me a "glorified babysitter," I knew at least he was concerned about my financial security, not just my intellectual stimulation. People who think I only need to be a step ahead of my kindergarten students really concern and (sometimes) amuse me. Who would think that someone with the mental capacities and academic skills of a six year old could teach five year olds? Alicia, who because of learning disabilities, accepts the judgment of others that she is not "smart," and her community college advisor who suggests that Alicia could teach kindergarten but couldn’t stay ahead of first graders. My mother-in-law, and my sister’s mother in-law, who hope the two of us may some day be smart enough to teach eighth grade. The school secretary, who says "I can’t find a credentialed substitute for you, or any one who has experience with kids, but I do have a man with two masters degrees and an emergency credential—he should be able to handle it." (After one day in the classroom, he begs to be taken off the sub list.) "Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach." The natural history museum director doesn’t believe this. She leaps around the corner of her desk to embrace me. "You’re hired! I don’t care if your degree isn’t in the sciences. You can teach kids!" Soon I am teaching a class on meteorology. I bring in a teakettle, bowls, ice cubes, slides of snowflakes, paper, scissors and a cardboard carton of other things to demonstrate weather concepts. My students—four and five year olds and the new director of our local National Weather Institute Marine Station, Dr. Martin—add their own moves to our circular rain cycle dance, share their cut paper snowflakes with each other, and chatter excitedly about how we formed clouds right inside the museum. When class is over, the students collect their new meteorological stuff. Dr. Martin looks like he wishes he could explain his clear plastic cup water cycle to his mom and dad, too. He can’t stop grinning. "I can’t believe little kids can understand this stuff! I never would have thought of any of these activities." I think maybe he will call his mom and dad. Otis, my 11-year-old nephew, who currently aspires to be a poet-artist-musician-famous architect, thinks those who can’t, should find a good teacher to help them learn how. He calls his mom in to see his favorite thing on television—a commercial. "Mom, it’s the one where that dad is trying to get his son to pick a job that will help the world, like a doctor. His son says he wants to be a teacher and if there were no teachers, where would doctors come from." Otis sighs with satisfaction, believing that he can create his life and his teachers will help him. I think about all my experiences teaching, the day-to-day challenges of helping students solve problems, the conversations that happen about learning, all the discoveries made about the world and myself, my own attitudes about teaching. I know from conversations that my dad had with his friends before he died, bragging about his children, that he actually could see that as a teacher, I was engineering young minds. Those who can, teach others to do. That’s an interesting and important job, and one I’m proud to do.