I ran into a friend of mine from high school, Attar, today. We got to talking about careers and stuff. He's working in internal medicine and his sister is also a doctor now. I told him that I was in graduate school, studying to become a high school biology teacher. We started talking about a biology teacher we both had. I was really surprised by what he had to say. I had a very positive experience with this teacher, who was also the coach of my Scholastic Bowl team. But he told me about a time when this teacher made his sister cry for days by telling her that she would never be able to become a doctor, which was her childhood dream. She said that she knew the work and effort it took to become a doctor and that she was incapable of it. It turns out that this teacher had also once wanted to become a doctor, but for one reason or another, she ended up teaching instead.
I guess the lesson I can draw from this is that people are very complex. People have many dimensions. Most people are not simply good or bad, but a mixture of both. Good people do bad things and bad people do good things. Good people do mediocre things and mediocre people sometimes do extraordinary things. I can't understand why this teacher would tell a student to give up on her dream. Maybe she was thinking she was being kind by sparing her student the humiliation of failure. But shouldn't a teacher have the highest expectations and hopes for his or her students? Her job was to inspire, to encourage, not to discourage. I don't know all the details of the relationship between this particular teacher and student. Still, I never want to be the type of teacher that tells students that they can't achieve, that they are doomed. I can't imagine where I would be today if my teachers had treated me that way.
Comments (2)
well i was rapidflu positive....so might as well take an antiviral for the flu :)
This is very interesting knowing who "the biology teacher" was. Here's my own non-philosophical version.
1. I know that teacher gives honest opinions. That's a strength and a weakness. I imagine something along the lines was said of "if you don't work hard at bio (i.e. you continue to be a bad student), then you will never become a doctor." It might not have been her place, but perhaps it was inspiring through negative reinforcement. That doesn't always work with people.
2. My friends did receive some negative but honest opinions. It was told to their parents, and that inspired them to work.
3. I don't think a teacher's job is to always inspire. There is some amount of tough love that's needed. My college adviser told me that no matter how smart I thought I was, graduate school would be a much more competitive pool. I did not apply and that was ultimately a good decision.
4. People are a mix of good and bad. I completely agree. We can view people as random variables, perhaps normally distributed around some level of niceness. Now, a good person may do a few bad things coincidentally around another individual. The other person does an inference based on these observations, as is natural. Won't those conclusions be biased? Add the further complexity that people actually change over time and you have the makings of irrational reactions. It's like judging whether to buy a stock today because you lost money on it years ago. We're not good at making such decisions!
So overall, very interesting article :)