People will probably glance at the name of my blog, and feel rather confused. I don't feel like an angel, I never have. It's just that I have been a teacher for about eight years now, and I've just recently began to understand why this seems such a tremendous job and why it takes sooo much just to do what it is that we do.
As I said, I am an elementary teacher. Love my work. Wouldn't have it any other way. But every year, it seems as if I have to try harder and harder. It always bothered me people would ask questions like "What made you become a teacher?" and the classic "What do you love about teaching?"
Whenever this came up, I tried to answer in a sensible, intelligent matter. The fact is, I don't have any one answer. And I don't believe people who spend hours pouring over sirupy, overused cliches do either. So much of my time (in between teaching, planning, cleaning, organizing, assessing, grading, fussing, more cleaning, meeting with parents, meeting with morons, going to workshops, etc.) was spent pondering the real reasons.
It is not because I love working my way through the mounds of paper the size of termite colonies sitting on my desk by the end of the week. Probably not the lunch lady, who used to drop-kick my snack basket if I dared bring it in late during testing week. I know it was not those endless tests and assessment forms, on some of which I am sure I promised my firstborn and my immortal soul.
I was reading up on math. And I found this paper on game theory--that is the math of probability and economics. There was a problem, posed by J.H. Conway about an angel who is chased across an infinite chessboard by a devil. Can the devil, who removes one square per move from an infinite chessboard, strand the angel, who can move 1000 squares per move? It is unresolved, but most math geeks (serious ones) believe that is unlikely, because if the angel is fast enough it can escape in three dimensions.
It made me think of all the negative things that wear us down when we teach--poverty, negativity, self-doubt, lack of energy, jerks of all shapes and sizes...and then I got it. I teach because I like this fight. It makes me feel that I can truly make a difference. It inspires me to be faster, wiser, better, and more resilient that anything else in my life. I teach because I love the game--and so far, I have managed to stay ahead of the devil.
Every kid who leaves my room a reader, or who says to me "Hey, I never knew math could be fun" has just giving me a 1000 squares.