In a recent interview, I was asked, “If you could choose anyone to teach your own children, what kind of person would you want?”
I love questions I have never been asked before. Even so, my answer was almost instantaneous:
Give me a teacher who didn’t start out as a teacher. Give me a teacher with a diverse collection of life experiences outside of education and a healthy dose of struggle and suffering.
If I were allowed to choose, I would choose a teacher who has dug ditches in Nicaragua, survived an encounter with a grizzly bear, panhandled across Europe, or spent ten years working in the private sector over a teacher who went from high school to college to graduate school to the classroom, absent any catastrophe, epic struggle, or life-altering cataclysm.
This is not to say that the traditional path to teaching produces bad teachers. I know many outstanding teachers who have followed this conventional approach.
I would place my own children in their classes any day.
However, if given the choice, I believe that diverse life experiences and wider perspectives bring more to a classroom than a stable life, a traditional path, and a college education.
Mark Twain famously said, “I never let school interfere with my education.”
Some of the best teachers I have ever known came to teaching from the most unorthodox and challenging routes imaginable. People who grew up poor. Owned small businesses. Operated heavy machinery. Served in the military. Worked as a bartender, a landscaper, and a cab driver for years. Managed an NGO. Climbed the corporate ladder. Changed careers many times.
These teachers are often confident enough to take enormous risks, test the boundaries of bureaucratic stupidity, and constantly ask for help.
These teachers can often distinguish between what is essential to learning and meaningless fluff.
These are often the teachers who know which corners can be cut and which are critical to the success of their students.
These teachers often demand great things from their students and know how to shut their mouths and get out of the way to allow those students to exceed expectations.
These teachers tend to be unflappable, remarkably resilient, highly efficient, supremely independent, and beloved by their students.
In the words of one of my fictional characters, these are the teachers who teach school rather than play school.
The path from high school to college to graduate school can undoubtedly produce great teachers. I know and have known many of them.
I am married to one.
Many of them are far more effective than me.
But if I had to choose my children’s teacher absent any other information, I would seek out a diversity of experiences, a broad and varied perspective of the world, and a life of epic struggle, cataclysmic failure, and modest success.
This is hardly a profound or novel position. It probably applies to most jobs.
Diversity of experience is far more valuable than anything else.
So when choosing a teacher for my children, I would seek out these qualities over advanced degrees in education from the finest universities every day because life often offers the most meaningful advanced degree possible.
