Клуб любителей английского языка

Каждая цитата заставляет задуматься. Мне еще нравится вот эта статья из журнала.

Why I Teach

Why do I teach? A friend asked me the question when I told him I didn’t want a university administrative position. He was puzzled that I didn’t want to “step up” toward money and power.

One thing is certain – I don’t teach because teaching is easy for me. Teaching is the most difficult of all the ways I have attempted to earn my living: bulldozer mechanic, carpenter, university administator, writer. For me, it’s a red-eye, sweaty-palm, sinking-stomach profession. Red-eye because I never feel ready to teach, no matter how late at night I stay up to prepare. Sweaty-palm, because I am always nervous before I enter a classroom, sure that I will be found out for the fool I am. Sinking-stomach, because I usually walk out an hour later convinced that I was ever more boring than usual.
Why, then, so I teach?

I teach because I like the pace of the academic calendar, June, July and August allow me to mix reflection, research and writing, all ingredients in my recipe for teaching. It is not that summers are less effort. It is that they are different effort.

I teach because teaching is built on change. Even when the material I teach is the same, I change, and more important, my students change.

I teach because I like the freedom to make my own mistakes, to learn my own lessons, to stimulate myself and my students. As a teacher, I am my own boss. If, as in a recent semester, I want freshmen to learn how to write by putting together their own textbook, well, who is to say I may not? The course may be a colossal failure, but we can learn from colossal failures.
I teach because I like to ask questions, questions that students must struggle to answer. The world is full of right answers to bad questions. Teaching, I sometimes brush up against good questions.

I teach because I like to learn. One of the major discoveries of my professional life is that I teach best not what I know, but what I want to learn. When I wanted to know more about the role of the Indian culture in American literatire, I taught a course on the subject, taking students with me on a path of discovery.

I teach because teaching gives me nectars to taste, many woods to enter and leave, many fine books to read, and many ivory towers and real world experiences to discover. Teaching gives me pace and variety and challenge and the opportunity to keep on learning.

I have not mentioned the most important reasons why I teach.

One is Vicky. My first doctoral student, Vicky was an energetic young woman who worked at a dissertation on a little-known 14th century poet. And while still in graduate school she wrote articles and sent them off to learned journals. She did it all herself, with only an occasional smile or nudge from me. But I was there when she finished her dissetation, when she got word that the articles were accepted, when she handed a job and won a fellowship to spend a year at Harvard working on a book developing ideas she had germinated as my student.

There is Julie. Her kids were growing up and she wanted to sit in one of my classes to see if she was college material. I was there when she came in, weeping, to apologize because she had failed her first test, even though she had studied for two weeks. It doesn’t matter that I later told her she had gotten a D, or that on the next test she got a B. It doesn’t matter that in the end she decided against college after all. It does matter that I was there when she asked.

There is George, who started out in engineering, then switches to English because he decided he liked people better than things.He stayed for a master’s degree and now teaches high-school English.

These are real reasons why I teach these people who grow and change in my presence. Being a teacher is being there, being present at the creation, when the clay begins to breathe.
A “promotion” out of teaching would give me money and power. But I already get paid for doing things I enjoy most: reading books, talking with people, making discoveries and asking questions.

And I already have power to nudge, to fan sparks, to ask troubling questions, to praise an attempted answer, to condemn hiding from the turth, to suggest books, to point out a path. What other power matter?

Teaching also offers something else: it offers love. Not only the love of learning and of books and ideas, but also the love a teacher feels for that rare student who walks into the life of a teacher and begins to breathe.

(From “Reader’s Digest”)

Оль, я уверена, это просто такой период сейчас у тебя - а на самом деле и в твоей профессии есть прекрасные моменты. А это не может быть иначе: ведь ты общаешься с таким количеством людей со всего мира! И все на любимом английском.