Future Teacher, Forever Student

Out of any word in the English language, I think I am most intimidated by “power.” It is full of contradictions: Power provokes a sense of accomplishment while implying the achievement and maintenance of power requires competition, hierarchy, and domination. Power is given and taken easily, and it yields to external factors beyond its control. Some people fear power, others are generous with it, and still more meet their doom when pride becomes its companion. Power allows for advancement. It provides a sense of order and control, but it can also create and fuel chaos. Individuals, groups, small islands, and large nations all possess a certain degree of power. As a future educator, the environment of my classroom will depend entirely on how I and my students handle the power we are given in our teacher-student relationships. More importantly, my power as a potential change-maker in their lives— through traditional lessons, personal relationships, worldly guidance, and honest compassion...

Before there were formalized schools, there were living rooms, church halls, back steps, battlefields, and the great outdoors. Education came in all shapes and sizes, from the modern understanding of “traditional” study through the analysis of past writings and artifacts to the natural signals one learned to recognize on the farm before an approaching storm. Students were not just young people hunched over a book shielded from the world behind brick walls. They were citizens learning how to manage a family business, reading and printing newspapers, planting seeds, plowing land, and striving to better prepare themselves for the future, whatever it held for them. Today’s students aim to do the same. Yet their education seems to have restricted itself to the boundaries of school property, or perhaps it occasionally wanders beyond county lines. What happened to learning about your environment— and all the life that lived and lives within it— by experiencing everything it has to offer fir...