Three

Q: What do you call the guy who graduates at the bottom of his med school class?

A: Doctor.

What does it take to be a teacher? The credentialing system that is currently in place requires a certain amount of course work and passing scores on some standardized tests. Neither of those things qualifies you to be a teacher, though. In theory, we act as if teaching is quantifiable, but in practice it is no such thing.

Teaching has been compared to herding cats, and that's not a bad analogy. In the name of skills and content, we try to impose a unified vision on a bunch of individuals who have little or no knowledge of those things. That's a lot of free will running around in a confined space for ten months or so-- somebody's bound to get hurt once in a while. Sometimes I think that teachers should swear the Hippocratic oath, first do no harm, because we have such ample opportunity to inflict injury, and in so many cases, we rely on the resiliency of the students to wash away our iniquities.

Neither Ruth nor I had children when we started our M.Ed, program, although she confided in me that she and her husband were trying to start a family. I guess she was thinking that being a teacher might be a good career when it came time to be a mom.