Who Gets the Credit, and Why Do We Care?

That’s the big question that all of Goethe’s writings led me to ask. I’ll start with some words from the ungrateful Prometheus as he cried to the heavens. “Was I not forged into a man, by all-powerful time/And eternal fate, my masters and yours?” He argues the same to Zeus that many atheists of our day argue to believers. God didn’t make me who I am today, he didn’t help me at all. I got here because of me. I am a product of my experience over time. The fate of the year molded this great edifice of a mortal. Things teachers teach will be forgotten. At one point or another we will believe we have taught ourselves things that were shown to us in classrooms by underpaid teachers in underfinanced schools. No one wants to remember those days, and so the teachers and the skills they taught become part of their own developing mind that evolved into its end product with no help from any outside source.
Goethe’s Faust also leads us into some interesting questions concerning the value of teaching. Here’s a man who is widely acclaimed as a learned professor, and yet he turns to the devil for some help. He’s done so much, but doesn’t seem like he’s done too much. Possibly because he hasn’t gone anywhere. My family lived in Linden, California for sixteen years. My father taught in the same portable classroom at Waterloo Middle School from 1991 to 2005, when he went to the high school. Having seen the before and after, the classroom looked exactly the same. The same posters of Michael Jordon, Mike Gallego and Mike Bordick and Dennis Eckersley that he posted when he got there were on the walls when he left. Some teachers don’t see more than one city, school, or classroom their entire careers. Yet young people come in and go out their doors every year, and all teachers can hope for is that they made a difference. On occasion they see an end product, but often they don’t. Without ever knowing what you’ve done to help, depression can verily easily creep up on you. The devil can drop in, and as Faust said, “The worst company will let you find that you’re a man among mankind.” In other words, the Faust had a pity party with the devil, and the phrase “I’m just a teacher and I don’t make a difference” throbbed in Faust’s head enough for him to throw in the towel.
When teachers feel like stepping down from their pulpit in self-pity and depression students don’t remember an effective, motivating, invigorating teacher who helped them become a better person, they remember a talking head who held up hoops through which students jumped and found loopholes to get around. Some of these students are not ruined by a sub-par education, however. They become professionals in law, business, health and the bureaucracy, and live very successful lifestyles. When they get there, they don’t remember an accomplished, wise teacher, they remember someone who’s still in the same portable classroom that they taught in fifteen years ago. To me, this is the saddest thing, and one that has affected me in my own life. People around me are going into careers in law, engineering, landscaping, business and forest rangering, and I’m going to be a teacher. I have always had a desire to teach, even though I danced around it forever before finally settling down right where I always wanted to be. These friends of mine will have grander “success”, perhaps, in the world, and live in nicer houses and drive more expensive cars and go on extravagant vacations, and I’ll love being a teacher, living somewhere around the poverty line and babysitting the teenagers of the entitlement generation and dealing with their whacked parents in a crackpot education system. That could get depressing at some point, so why do I want to do it?
People in other professions look for jobs where coworkers are competent and hardworking, the working environment is comfortable, and the company is profitable and well organized. Teaching won’t always be like that, and that’s something you realize when you decide that teaching is what you want to do. For a while I would tell people that I planned on going to grad school and studying education policy, but the more I thought about it, the more I didn’t want those jobs. I love statistical research and analysis, but I don’t really want to be that distanced from the front lines. I want to teach and at some point go into administration, really find ways that work and put them to use. I guess the paycheck never worked as my motivation, but a worthwhile challenge that I believe in is worth working on--even if the payout isn’t that great.
In conclusion I refer back to the words of Prometheus. “Here I sit, shaping man, after my image…To rejoice and be glad, and like myself/To have no regard for you!” Goethe hit it right on the spot. Faust and Prometheus worked for the wrong reasons. Maybe Faust should have gone into a more lucrative profession if he was going to dismiss God as the fount of all knowledge and give himself all the credit. If we don’t give credit where it’s due, we’ll be very surprised that day when we think we deserve it and we don’t get any either.