My professional goals.
As a teacher at the fresh-faced beginning of what is likely to be a decades-long journey in the education field, I have accumulated a few professional goals. But how to distill them into a succinct, well-presented "goals statement..."
- Never to lose my optimistic ideals about education.
- Don't allow the bureaucracy and red tape of the public-school system to put its stranglehold on me.
- View each child for all the possibilities he or she possesses, even if the child cannot see them.
In a fast-changing world which seems to have cast out the opinions of the public intellectual in favor of broadcasting the antics of the public idiot, there seems to be a vast, silent majority of people who would rather just not think at all. I see it in some of my students; they simply want everything shown to them. Any time I ask them to infer or string more than two words together into their own original thought, it's as if I am asking them to conjure lightning from a cloudless sky.
I really want to learn how to make critical thinkers out of a generation of children who have been passive observers as a result of a convergence of many different circumstances. There are circumstances imposed by the poverty culture; by the entertainment culture of the modern era; hover-parents who never permitted children to think on their own and work things out.
It's been a long time, at least a couple years, since I've done any formal writing. I'm a highly cerebral person who never got into the habit of composing my thoughts on paper. Hashing this out has helped me consolidate some of my ideas; tomorrow I'll park it at my dining room table with a pot of coffee and churn out my goals statement.
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