You know, after subscribing to the teaching community on livejournal for awhile, as well as talking personally with a number of teachers, I have discovered something interesting.
The difference in attitudes and educational philosophies between public and private school teachers is incredible. It’s all starting to make sense to me why I feel I would enjoy teaching there more, and why I enjoyed attending private school more in the first place.
Most of the public school teachers seem at least moderately disenchanted, disengaged, and dissatisfied with their jobs, something I don’t see as often with the private school teachers. There really seems to be something about being forced to work within the public school system with all its beaurocracy that makes people seem almost disinterested in their jobs. On the other side of the road, the private school teachers seem pretty enthusiastic about their students and their curriculums. They seem do enjoy their schools’ administration, and are more actively involved in the school itself.
I mean, I know it’s not all kittens and roses, but many of these people seem genuinely apathetic about their jobs, and resigned to teaching crappy curriculums. I really don’t think it has to be that way. It is significantly harder in a public school to express yourself in the classroom, and I think that that is one of the major failings of public education today, and a huge cause of teacher disengagement.
There are other things as well that contribute to public school teacher disenchantment, but I think that what I’m really trying to say here is that I really think that the public school system has some major problems, and that the teachers are suffering because of it, and are becoming worse teachers because of it, and thus are spending more time hating their jobs. And I don’t want to be a part of that, if I don’t have to.
Visiting friends this summer has been interesting for me. First Peter and I went to Maine, where we visited people that I only really know through Peter. I’m friends with them, but they’re people I probably wouldn’t have ever talked to without Peter. Those friends are different in that I don’t have a background with them, so there’s not really much to talk about other than current stuff. And you run out of current stuff pretty fast.
When I came down here to Providence to see Kate and Sam, it has been a very different experience. Kate and Sam have both known me since my first year of Hampshire, and even more importantly, have known me since before Peter. Since dating Peter I have changed a decent bit, as always happens with me when I get seriously involved with someone, and so it’s important to me to have friends who have known me in a ‘previous incarnation’. We talk about completely different stuff than I talk to people currently at Hampshire about, and it’s really refreshing. It’s also different because they’re friends on my terms, not anybody else’s. It’s a very different feeling to be a friend of someone through somebody else, and I feel like I have very few people at Hampshire who I’m friends with through myself anymore.
