On Teaching: TEACHING AND ROCKET SCIENCE

Whenever I stop to think about it carefully, I realize that the work I do as a teacher is more complicated than the work engineers, mathematicians, and scientists do. Way more complicated. This goes contrary to the typically accepted attitude toward teaching – that it’s a fairly easy profession to get into, that almost anyone can do it, that it’s not “rocket science”, after all. Most people would never put teaching and astrophysics, for example, on the same level of difficulty. The astrophysicist, people would say, must be much smarter than a teacher because he is dealing with a far more intricate and convoluted subject. People, I think, generally picture engineers and mathematicians and engineers with unusually large brains, and teachers with normal-sized, average brains. I find this more and more astonishing as the years pass, because teaching seems more and more multifaceted and enigmatic. What I do each day in the classroom seems like a vast mystery that grows deeper and darker with each year. When I look at students sitting around the table in my room, I often feel like an astronomer staring into the infinite reaches of space. After all, these are human beings I am dealing with, and I am attempting to do nothing less than alter their lives from the inside out. In the entire universe, there is nothing more complex than a human being, and I am entrusted with shaping the minds of forty-three of them. I find that astonishing, frightening, and almost overwhelming to consider. I feel like an astrophysicist trying to understand the most complicated kind of “rocket science”, and finally realizing that it’s way beyond anything I can comprehend. I'm not an engineer, a mathematician, or a scientist. No, I'm smart enough to be a teacher, one of the chosen few, one of the elite, and I couldn't be prouder.