XXIX. The bane of my intellectual existence - The Teacher -

The profession of teacher, even at the chocolate milk induced age of seven, struck me as an unnecessary, frustratingly ritualistic, and socially encouraged power-trip.

I know I called you “mom” in second grade, (this childhood mishap only occurred once, mind you), but, you’re not my mother! 

While in high school, my stance against the profession of teacher did not waver. However, I no longer condemned my teachers for unauthorized parental surrogacy. Instead, I disagreed with my teachers in the classroom on a fundamentally ideological level. I challenged their concept of correct writing technique and met their gaze with the resilience of a Harvard-obsessed youth.

Still, I have never been more against teaching as a profession until the first day of my college career.

By now, one realizes that teachers or professors, are human and can be seen outside walking- they’re walking, not strutting as they usually do so that their briefcase swings to the point of unnatural arm extension, and they are silent, not spouting the usual opinionated speech and  future exam questions in their primal form.

While the semantics of hierarchy is something I encourage, I still fail to see how the label “professor”, connoting the teaching of students who are older (age-wise), is directly correlated to occupying a higher rung on the pedagogy ladder.

If you have a PhD and someone else does not, I completely understand the warranted desire for acknowledgment of said sleep-deprived years. However, a good majority of my high school teachers also had doctorates from some of the same academic institutions that my college professors had earned their PhDs from, and so my previous statement stands.

You all, my professors, are teachers.

Teachers are solely the gatekeepers of the grade.

I do not find myself absorbing the content that the teacher who is being paid, so graciously offers. Furthermore,  the teacher is but a subjective medium for communicating facts that is learned outside of the lecture hall anyway.

In short, there is no absorption or extraction, no academic give-and-take, that still remains to be seen as an inherent characteristic of the teaching profession.

Today I overheard a conversation between a graduate student, a professor-in-the-making, and an undergraduate freshman.

The vulnerability of the freshman made me retract in an all too familiar horror. This quasi-professor was stating the identical criticism, word-for-word, that no less than eight of my professors have told me. Didn’t the people who taught you this rehearsed monologue in graduate schools of education tell you about the long-known inefficacy of rote memorization?

Miss grad student, in her overly exerted accentuated speech, stated: “Yes, the problem is not the content; it is not your ideas… it’s your inability to articulate your ideas. You have to be concise and….”

For the most part she is trying to tell you to write using simple sentence structure reminiscent of the students enrolled in E.S.L. (English as a Second Language) classes that were available in elementary school.

When did education become a means for encouraging standardization of academia? - reading the “proactive” way and writing for a bunch of people who, inspired by the recent devaluation of the dollar, are on a mission to bring about the immediate demise of the English language - one of my true loves.

What gives you the authority to hamper the life of another via grading, according to something as irrational as your emotions at a given time?

Sorry Oprah, but the teaching profession is a mockery of the concept of pedagogy and has as much integrity as does the healthy sounding Wheat Thins that has 5 g of fat/ an unsatisfying serving size -