When I first decided to be a teacher it was because I was in trouble. By my senior year of high school I had been in trouble enough times that I was bored by receiving long-winded speeches, getting sent to the hallway, and staying late for detention. After talking excessively during my Econ class I figured I would try something different. When my teacher talked to me after class I negotiated to swap the detention for what I thought would be an easier punishment. I offered to teach his class for a day.
If I taught his class for a day I would learn what teaching is all about, and I had been thinking about education from the myriad list of potential college majors. His facial expression was a mixture predictable skepticism and confusion, so I pushed my argument further. The details of the conversation escapes me, but I know I argued that understanding the difficulties that teacher face would stop me from talking to my friends in class and make me not want to interfere any lesson ever again. Before I got too far into it, Mr. Faricy agreed to the deal, with a little more enthusiasm than I thought was appropriate. His knowing grin, of course, was foreshadowing the awful, awful lesson that transpired when I taught his intro to economics class next week.
