quaint little rutted bucket



Sunday, May 01, 2005

All in a day's work (An Inquirer 'Young Blood' op-ed piece)

Link

I was writing a paper for my guidance and counseling class about what motivated me to enter education and I saw this while slack researching on the Web. As it turns out, here was somebody who shared essentially my views on what a career is all about.

We Filipinos seem to have this notion of having a less than prestigious job (read: either blue collar or really back breaking) are not really worth being proud of. This includes, sadly, teaching. For a profession that, at its core, deals with the future of this nation, teaching is perhaps the most misunderstood, neglected profession in this society. A lot of people try teaching because, hey, all it takes is good communication skills, right?

Wrong.

Lecturing != teaching.

I remember this adage that has been said by not only one of my professors in CED:
"Everybody can lecture. But not everybody can teach." What it simply tells us is that anybody can stand in front of a class and deliver a lecture. Heck, even my fifth grade brother could do that. But to expect that somebody who lectures relatively well but has no formal training in teaching be a good teacher... might be taking things a bit too far.

And besides, I want to teach. What is the point of being in a career that pays well but you don't have any inclination for? Is it something worth pursuing? In this bloke's book, that is a big not. For me, career < character. It means that a career is a facet of who you are as individual. The career you have defines who you are. It means having passion for the things you do for a living.

Personally, I could not see myself working in a cubicle for hours on end. It would be a job that would bore me to death. I got out of CS simply because I don't want a job that would largely be dealing with computers. (and computer-related work, like coding, troubleshooting, configuration, design, performance profiling, optimization, etc etc etc) I see myself reaching out to people, touching lives. I could've done that by becoming a priest or a pastor, but then, that would require me to take a vow of chastity and never have a biological family of my own. (Which is something that I don't like.)

I don't care if teaching will put me in an income bracket a notch lower than most other professionals in this God forsaken country. As the article said, we Filipinos have become so fixated on the income that we fail to realize the value of the line of work we are intending to enter. In the end, a lot of people unhappy and unmotivated with their jobs.

I don't want to be a casualty.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home