Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Teaching has its benefits

I can't see myself teaching English forever or even an extended time period for that matter, but the job certainly has its merits.

One of the most unexpected is that I never feel tired on the job. A class can be boring, torturous even, but I never feel the urge to lay my head down and sneak in a little shut-eye.

My last job at a naval hospital was good in that it afforded me plenty of free time to study for the LSAT and browse the Internet, but I hit up the office vending machine for caffeine more times each day than the fat co-workers...and that's saying something.

In Florida, I was working as a pizza delivery driver for Domino's. That job was good because....wait, scratch that. That job sucked. There was nothing good about that job. If any of my readers are aspiring pizza delivery drivers, abandon ship! But that's a story for a different day. At times, I was so tired, it was a miracle I didn't kill anyone while driving. D-man used to be so tired that he developed a hilarious habit of leaving entire pizzas on the roof of his car as he drove away, only to have them come cascading down the side of his Integra and get run over by his back wheel. He then had to embarrassingly stop and exit the car to pick up the "advanced signature" Domino's heatbag while traffic zoomed past. I put that in quotations because the heatbag was nothing more than standard non-conductive material with some velcro.

Teaching is an extremely versatile profession. You get exactly what you put into it. If I want to challenge myself and become the best teacher possible, that option is available to me. If I want to coast through my classes like a native-English speaking zombie, that option is also there. You put in a lot of hard work and you start to see great results from your students -- classes become more fun, they learn more, and you feel good when leaving the building. Compare that to pizza delivery driving. Sure, you could work hard and get that pizza there two minutes faster and maybe get that extra $0.50 tip (yeah!) but, at the end of the day, you're still delivering one of the main culprits of the obesity epidemic to lazy Americans. And you're destroying your car while you do it. There's no satisfaction in that.

There's another great perk to teaching as well.

You can blog while you do it! The students are taking a test right now.

1 comment:

  1. Aww I like this entry! Makes me looking forward to teaching again in August :)

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