What do you want your legacy as a teacher to be?

I don’t know.  All the goals that seem to satisfy others: “making a difference in one child’s life,” don’t really move me. What does it mean, to make a difference? If my student wrote that, I’d want specifics.

            I’d like to teach them to think. To ignite a passion for learning where it lies dormant, and to guide it into ever deeper, more intricate and intimate places. And that’s what I feel so incompetent at. This is a major source of my discontent. I want to take kids deep into ideas, I want them to understand that Golding’s view is wrong, that people are not evil. That’s how I structured the course. But we are constantly interrupted, constantly, with the need to teach parts of speech at the level of nouns and verbs, things which should have been taught in the elementary grades and which seem to have been overlooked. How can we make progress when we have to struggle with capitals and periods. How?

            But what would I like? I’d like to help clear thinkers express their unique ideas competently.