Teaching
I've been inspired to blog about every career I've considered since graduating from college. Maybe it will help me make sense of what I want to do in the future, because I feel very lost right now. Hopefully it will be amusing. I encourage comments on all this!
Let's start with teaching. There seem to be myriad kinds of teaching, so I'll try to cover them all in one post. Everyone is always telling me to teach, I guess because I went to a liberal arts college and always did well in school. The type of teaching I've most seriously considered is giving ukulele lessons. This is inspired by my own difficulties in finding a teacher who won't make me play only Hawaiian music. Ukulele seems to be a growing trend so I would imagine that the demand for such lessons would only increase in the future. However, there's the problem that I'm nowhere near good enough to teach anyone besides an absolute beginner, and I'm not sure what I'd do when my student quickly became more skilled than myself. I start new lessons for myself on Sunday, which I'm psyched about. I wonder if, with this new help, I can improve quickly enough to become a teacher myself.
And my mom is always telling me to be a college professor. Or, she's telling me to get a PhD in totally esoteric topics, which pretty much means the same thing. I have a gut feeling against being a college professor. What my mom doesn't understand is that it's actually really hard to get this job, especially if you're a professor of something that I would conceivably be teaching. People say, "You could spend most of your time doing research". But. I hate teachers that don't actually like teaching, and it would pain me greatly to be one of these kinds of teachers. As comforting as it might be to be in school for the rest of my life, something still seems wrong about this.
Another thing I've thought of teaching is special ed. I think I could be good at this, since I'm extremely patient thanks to having a learning disability myself. I think I could be a positive role model for kids that have disabilities. However, I think all school up to college is pretty much baby-sitting and personally, I never learned all that much of real use. Maybe I should start my own anarchist private school where I teach kids useful things for the "real world" like overthrowing the government and making your own guns out of cardboard rolls. Well, I'm kidding about the last part, but I think there might actually be a need for a school that doesn't just mold you into a cog in the machine. My problem is that I have a ton of ideas that might be crazy enough to work. But, I don't have the slightest idea how to execute any of them. So if anyone wants to tell me how to get an anarchist school set up, I will name the gym after you.
Let's start with teaching. There seem to be myriad kinds of teaching, so I'll try to cover them all in one post. Everyone is always telling me to teach, I guess because I went to a liberal arts college and always did well in school. The type of teaching I've most seriously considered is giving ukulele lessons. This is inspired by my own difficulties in finding a teacher who won't make me play only Hawaiian music. Ukulele seems to be a growing trend so I would imagine that the demand for such lessons would only increase in the future. However, there's the problem that I'm nowhere near good enough to teach anyone besides an absolute beginner, and I'm not sure what I'd do when my student quickly became more skilled than myself. I start new lessons for myself on Sunday, which I'm psyched about. I wonder if, with this new help, I can improve quickly enough to become a teacher myself.
And my mom is always telling me to be a college professor. Or, she's telling me to get a PhD in totally esoteric topics, which pretty much means the same thing. I have a gut feeling against being a college professor. What my mom doesn't understand is that it's actually really hard to get this job, especially if you're a professor of something that I would conceivably be teaching. People say, "You could spend most of your time doing research". But. I hate teachers that don't actually like teaching, and it would pain me greatly to be one of these kinds of teachers. As comforting as it might be to be in school for the rest of my life, something still seems wrong about this.
Another thing I've thought of teaching is special ed. I think I could be good at this, since I'm extremely patient thanks to having a learning disability myself. I think I could be a positive role model for kids that have disabilities. However, I think all school up to college is pretty much baby-sitting and personally, I never learned all that much of real use. Maybe I should start my own anarchist private school where I teach kids useful things for the "real world" like overthrowing the government and making your own guns out of cardboard rolls. Well, I'm kidding about the last part, but I think there might actually be a need for a school that doesn't just mold you into a cog in the machine. My problem is that I have a ton of ideas that might be crazy enough to work. But, I don't have the slightest idea how to execute any of them. So if anyone wants to tell me how to get an anarchist school set up, I will name the gym after you.