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It is sad but true: teachers make the worst students. I have had this nagging and disturbing thought ever since I became a teacher some 35 years ago.
I recently took a computer seminar at an Edmonton Apple store. I was having trouble keeping up with the rest of the class, which consisted of one other person: my wife. She catches on quickly, is attentive, asks good questions and excels at what she does. She is not a teacher. She is a social worker; they see the human condition differently than the rest of us. When the youthful, tech-savvy Apple instructor asked me what I did for a living, I avoided eye contact and while fiddling with my wireless mouse admitted that I was a teacher.
“Teachers make the worst students,” he laughed. “They always want to know the answers right away.” I know a mocking laugh when I hear one. I knew I should have told him I was a social worker, but it was too late.
Sadly, I had to agree with him. Teachers make bad students. Join me in a flashback or, better yet, have one of your own if you don’t want to use mine. I am thinking about any number of conferences, seminars, lectures, guest speaker appearances, staff meetings and committee meetings, and as my professional life passes before me in a dramatic but very quick mental VHS-format video loop, I can think of teachers in all of these situations all doing the same stupid things we don’t want, and never would allow, our students to do. I have witnessed teachers talking during prayers or announcements, laughing at jokes during meetings, texting (imagine that!), marking papers, passing notes (low-tech texting) and generally being inattentive at all the wrong times. Teachers are bad listeners and students.
Why is this you may ask? Why this ironic turn of events?
Theory 1 states that because teachers have never left school and spend much of their time in discipline mode, correcting, marking, wiping noses, encouraging, motivating, putting on kids’ snowsuits, nagging, directing, lecturing, modelling and much more, at some point they reach a neuron saturation point in their long-term memory. Some neurons actually start to fray at the end like a used, worn-out piece of rope. When teachers become students, say at a seminar or staff meeting, there is an almost spontaneous polar reversal of actions, values, attitudes and behaviour, and they almost predictably begin to act out in bizarre ways, becoming like the very people they don’t want to be—students. It is a release of pent-up emotions associated with doing one thing over a career and, all of a sudden, in all the wrong places, we act out.
I would like to think that teachers are not the only professionally confused group. I know of accountants who don’t manage their personal finances efficiently or even do their own income tax returns. Nurses and doctors, I am convinced, make the worst patients. Rhetorically, I’ll just add that I would bet that off-duty police officers are not all paragons of virtue. Do Sarah Lee and Betty Crocker really like baked goods? Does the Michelin Man have a driver’s license? Does the Pillsbury Doughboy have an eating disorder? Is Uncle Ben really someone’s uncle? Clearly, we teachers do not stand alone in our professional role-reversal problem.
Theory 2 is predicated on the fact that we have never been out of school in our entire lives. I mean look at me. I am 60 and I am still in high school. How disturbing is that on some Freudian level? My id and ego just don’t want to have anything to do with each other anymore, and the situation is getting extremely serious. So the theory goes that because of this sustained time in the school system, we have never really grown up. Therefore, when we are in a setting in which we have to be a student, we often fail miserably because we have never really matured and faced the real world.
I have to admit, those aren’t my words. They are the words of a certain social worker who texted them to me while she was in an Apple computer class. Yet another sad little irony, I thought.
Marty Rempel is special education coordinator at Athabasca Delta Community School, in Fort Chipewyan, Alberta.
