Why I Teach

The four different ways I perceive teaching—as a job, as a career, as a profession, and as a calling—effect the reasons why I teach. When I look at teaching as a job, my reasons for teaching are practical—it pays the bills. People give me money every month for a service I provide and with that money, I can purchase what I need to survive, whether the rent on a one bedroom apartment or 20 frozen dinners or a new winter coat. My reasons for teaching as a career are practical as well. My family values teaching as a stable career that has relatively good benefits and can be pursued no matter where I live. Usually, unless I choose to work in the inner city, teaching as a career is safe, and the people I associate with, for the most part, are educated with similar moral values and beliefs. When my child was young, teaching provided a way for me to be with him when he wasn’t in school without having to rely on daycare as most other working mothers did. As a career, teaching also offers the opportunity for long periods of rest with Christmas, spring break, and summer vacations. A career and a profession may seem like synonyms for each other, but they are separate entities to me. To me, a profession means that higher level of education necessary to hold a white-collar job, important coming from a family whose ancestors were mostly farmers, and not necessarily well-educated ones. My mother’s family emphasized the importance of education, to become part of the professional class, not only for the security it offered but also because it meant achieving the dream of having their children be more successful than they were. While teachers may not be held in the same esteem as they were a generation ago, they are still viewed as professionals. Everyone can’t teach. It requires learned skills and inherent talents. While all these viewpoints (job, career, and profession) have contributed to why I teach, the one that is the most esoteric and, therefore, the most difficult to explain is the last, teaching as a calling. A calling is an evangelical term with all its connotations. In its original meaning, God chooses someone to preach and teach. He speaks to that person in a voice that cannot be ignored. There is also the idea that money does not matter if one is called. The experience itself and the subsequent place in heaven is the reward. Teaching is like that for me in some ways. I want to help other people, not just to succeed in life, to be able to write and read and think critically, but to thrive in life. To see the beauty and horror of the English language in all its power, to appreciate those who can mold it to create experiences that they can share, to feel the power of story as it shows the ways others have gone before them, and, perhaps, to be able to become those who can contribute to the next generation. That is why I teach.