One of the wonderful thing about being a teacher is that your students have an incredible way of keeping things in perspective for you. One of my favourite poems is 'Ulysses', by Lord Alfred Tennyson. It is a long poem that is chock full of big words and archaic sentence structure. As my students would describe it, long, stupid, boring, and nonsensical. They were quite shocked to hear that I had actually wasted time to memorize the whole thing. Wait until we get to Shakespeare...
The whole point is that when I forget that the whole world doesn't share my tastes, or my interests I have about 50 kids who will gladly remind me. Now, I know that my students' interests are going to be very different from those of most people over 25; however, they still bring me down to earth a little and make me realize that even though it's okay for me to be interested in long, boring, stupid, nonsensical stuff, it's not okay for me to think that they may, for even a slight moment in time, be just as interested in it, at least at this point in their lives.
The trick then becomes, how do I turn them onto this long, boring, stupid, nonsensical stuff.
Well, that trick is the holy grail of teaching in any subject.
It's kind of ironic that as I write this I have Supertramp telling me in the background that the answers are easy to find... I guess I'm looking in the wrong places.
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