Not even a back-handed compliment.

I was boring my dad last night with the details of plans that I have for my future classroom - things like current events and creative writing. Pretty innocuous stuff, in my eyes. He said, "Yep. You're the kind of teacher I hated when I was a kid." Oh.

Just when I think that I've got a good idea...

I taught Emerson's "Self-Reliance" while I was working as a student teacher in college. The classroom consisted of about 30 kids from a rural Appalachian background. I was young and full of ideas about inspiring kids to think big thoughts.

Some of the kids even looked intrigued when I began to broach the subject of Transcendentalism - Emerson's philosophy, not a weird new-age cult, bear in mind - and when I opened a discussion on the ideas of "self" and "mind" many of the students began waxing philosophical. I was thrilled by this sense of success and well-being that came over me when I saw the fruits of my labor...

And then...

There were these two girls sitting towards the back of the classroom, filing their nails the way that Carol Burnett used to do when she played the telephone operator, smacking gum, looking distracted. One girl looked at the other and hissed, with a dramatic roll of her eyes, "You know what she's trying to do, don't you? She's trying to make us think."

"Trying to make us think." She said it with the exact tone that a person might say, "She's trying to make us burn the flag." Or "she's trying to make us kill our parents." Or "she's trying to make us burn down Santa Claus' house."

"Trying to make us think." Those words went through me and made contact with that part of my brain that had been filled with exuberance just ten seconds earlier. Was I doing something wicked? Was I doing something against the laws of man and God?

Not "she's trying to make us learn algebra" or "she's trying to make us memorize vocabulary words."

Not that there's anything inherently wrong with those things either, but they rank, in my eyes, with the mundane tasks of paper-filing and file-management. I can see how they might be met with little enthusiasm.

However, I would hardly call attempting to allow teenagers to ask questions and to speculate on possible answers a seditious activity. But I could be wrong.

I guess my point is that the exciting part of teaching to me, the part that has always drawn me to the profession, is the Socratic part. The role that the teacher can play (if she chooses) in encouraging free and extraordinary thought. And I forget sometimes that a lot of students just want to get through the day with a minimum of exertion.

I suppose that it's a good thing to be reminded of before I go back in with those high hopes of lighting the fuse of the next John Steinbeck or Adrienne Rich or Toni Morrison.