I was a professor at BYU for six years, so the article "Is the Great American Teacher Dead?" which examines the quality of college professors today, felt particularly relevant to me. In this article, John Ivers raises the point that most educators didn't go into the field for the money, so, at least at the outset of their teaching careers, there was probably some deeper meaning in it for them. For me, I found great meaning in teaching. I loved the feeling of connecting with my students, helping them understand something new, helping them learn and grow.
However, I'm not sure I always did a great job connecting with the sorts of deeper issues Ivers says professors should be grappling with in their classes. I taught first-year academic writing classes. This means my focus was to teach incoming freshmen how to write at a college level. I believe deeply in the power of writing for good, both on a personal level and a societal level, and I tried to convey that belief to my students. I tried to show them how having good writing skills could benefit them personally, but I could have done a better job showing them how those skills could help them help society. I didn't ignore that aspect of things completely, but I still could have done a better job.
Now, I am preparing to teaching English as a second language to adult English language learners. I don't know yet in what setting I will teach, but it's not likely I'll teach it at another university. Regardless of where I teach, though, the issue of meaning is one I'll need to figure out. Here again, I think for me the deeper meaning I get from teaching is the chance to help students develop a critical skill, something that will be useful and necessary in their lives. And I think I can do a good job of showing my students how learning the English language will benefit them personally. But I'll need to figure out how to help my students see how learning English connects with those larger societal issues Ivers mentions in his article ("hunger, war, poverty, or starvation").
Do any of you have any thoughts on this? How does learning English help students grapple with these larger societal issues? I suppose that learning English helps students living in an English-speaking country engage with society more, just in general, so in that sense, they can then engage with these societal issues more as well. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this, though. Any comments, classmates?
