You live and you live.

“Learning doesn’t matter.” - Cody Lambert 

I’ve never once felt so broken by three words in my whole life. I went to school for four years for a profession that doesn’t exist. That’s the reality of what has hit me harder than training with the Miami Dolphins because someone said I was playing football but I was actually going over to Manchester to play what Americans call soccer. 

When I decided to be a teacher, I didn’t want to teach about punctuation or grammar(clearly from this BLAHG). I wanted to teach students to be the best they can be for THEMSELVES. not mom, dad, grandparents, friends, bosses, teachers… anyone else. I wanted to teach young people to do better than people my age have for themself and the world as a whole. 

Society is filled with so many beaten people who had hopes and dreams but were never told they could do what they wanted to do. No one believed in them. I am a teacher because I believe everyone can do whatever they want. 

Unfortunately, I don’t know if I do anymore. 

I don’t know if I believe the teaching I dreamed of exists. 

When a student goes to school it should be to learn. Not JUST content. A student should be opening their mind to bigger ideas, bigger thoughts, bigger concepts. A student should leave high school prepared to progress society further than their parents. They should learn about themselves, each other, the world, and most importantly, they should learn to learn. 

THAT is what has been lost. 

A student’s mind should be ever growing. All of our minds should be growing. We should always be learning and progressing the way we think. It’s called growth, dickhead, look it up. 

The process of learning is learning the most important subject. Our minds should always be open to new ideas, we should always be able to re-evaluate something. We should be open to learning a new concept, applying it, thinking on it, having some self reflection, and then going out to progress the idea and world forward. 

We should never stop growing mentally, emotionally, empathically, or in maturity. 

That’s not happening. 

Here’s what I see SHOULD be a student and teachers top three objectives. 

STUDENT:

Learn

Self reflect

Grow

TEACHER:

Student safety(physical and mental)

Believing in EVERY student

Guiding student learning. 

Here’s what I see in the real world.

STUDENT:

How to get a good letter grade 

Not be miserable

How to find ways around rules that prevent enjoyment. 

TEACHER:

Enforce rules

Make sure students say the right answer

Not piss off admin or other teachers

It’s a weird culture, right?

A teacher should be learning from students. The classroom should be collaborative. The classroom becoming “the answer is A” and the student memorizes A to get an A on a test and forget about it is discouraging. 

Do not get me twisted here, I know some of the best teachers that exist. I work with them, I have worked with them… I have also worked with the opposite. 

At some point it feels school has become another employee/manager relationship where students are trying everything they can to NEVER give the wrong answer. 

If a student walks into my class they should get every single answer wrong on a pretext about what I’m teaching them, when they leave, they should have an A. We’ve built a culture where students think they have to know the right answer on day one or they’ll fail the class and get in trouble at home, not get a good job, and therefore be eating someone’s leftovers. 

Progress is what should be important. 

Empathy should be important. 

Being wrong should be celebrated. 

I want to be wrong about things. I want to learn new things. That’s what society should do. 

Memorization isn’t doing anything, we’re performing the definition of insanity and expecting students to magically change the world. 

It ain’t happening unless we show them we care about them beyond what we “get paid for.”

I tell my students when we’re writing journals to not worry about punctuation or grammar. Get comfortable with writing their thoughts. Be bad at it comfortably so we can learn. 

I didn’t start skating trying to do FS bluntslides. 

I still can’t. 

I never will. 

But I could if I learned. 

But the students ask if they’re going to get a bad grade for spelling. No. That is not the focus. That can be learned. First you have to be able to stand on the skateboard. That’s step one. 

Students are looking up answers to questions and cheating so they don’t fail. They are not finding importance in learning because no one is telling them why it is important. 

“You’ll need it later!”

Ain’t no one needing to know about no double negatives!

See, I’m a published writer. 

None of this matters. 

It’s just a shame that students are using critical thinking to find new ways to avoid rules, and teachers are using critical thinking to find new ways to enforce rules. 

I’m not encouraging anarchy, but I am discouraging the American prison system in a mask that says EDU. 

Maybe I should have been a florist. 

K thx.