Teaching Despite a Forest Full of Snakes

The other day I was happy to have attended a staff meeting.  This was a first, I hate staff meetings.  They are long and boring and generally unnecessary and the free tea and bread does not make that hour (or 2, if the headmaster is feeling particularly long-winded) any better.  What made this particular staff meeting different was that several enterprising young men with a guitar asked to come and entertain us by performing a song that they had written entitled "I am a Competent and Responsible Teacher."  This song contained lyrics about how the speaker would teach even if it was necessary to climb a mountain or go through a forest full of snakes.  It was adorable and conveyed warm fuzzy feelings about teaching that, like so many warm fuzzy feelings, could not stand up to the realities and frustrations of actual teaching.

There are the normal frustrations, as when I give my students lab exercises identical to what we have done together in class and discover that they cannot get through simple computer tasks without me holding their hands because many of my students very clearly do not give a damn about my class and do not pay attention.  I vacillate between not caring about them either and trying to only teach to the students who do care, and feeling incredible guilt about this because back as a TAing grad student I had it drilled into me, by the bad-tempered professor who hated students no less (a friend of mine would draw this professor as an action figure in a box that came with dismissive comments and an intimidating glare), that one does not simply abandon the bottom of a class.

Then there are the abnormal frustrations, which come up during my pedagogy class.  This is the period in which I simply have the students take turns doing microteaching and evaluating one another because it's fun and I can't really think of anything more useful to do with this time.  I refuse to teach them how to do the unnecessary paperwork which is the subject of the pedagogy syllabus.   The problem, of course, with giving students such free rein to speak to one another is that I sometimes hear things I really wish I didn't.  Such as students who criticize one another for "being unstable.  He would hear from a student that something he said was wrong and immediately correct it."  In other words, students shouldn't correct teachers even if teachers are wrong, and it is more important to be an authority figure than to have intellectual credibility.  I argue with my students about this a lot.  They will agree with me because I am the teacher and continue to criticize their fellows for being receptive to the possibility that they are wrong.   I am starting to consider telling them that god wants them to not accept authority unquestioningly, but that might make some heads explode.  Also, I'm attached to my own intellectual credibility.  I know a volunteer in Songea who convinced people to start composting by telling them that god gave them even the trash for their use and was sad that people were just burning it without using it.   So claiming authority can work, but I don't need to create another generation of teachers who are right because they are the teachers.