Teaching

I finally told my mom that I was thinking about becoming a teacher. I don't know why I hesitated. She and my brother spend so much time talking about autism and learning disabilities and teaching from the perspective of a learning disabilities specialist, I just felt like they would expect me to think about teaching in exactly the same way. They get on such tangents, and I just hae absolutely no interest in going that route. I think of children as students, not as test subjects. Or that is, when I become a teacher, that's how I'll look at students. I want to spend m time reaching people, finding out how they learn, how they think, and reaching them, rather than studying them as experimental subjects. I'm less interested in making a general statement about how such and such type of student learns than I am in finding an approach to reach particular students. I've always been a good one on one teacher, a tutor, and I can't think of anythign less interesting to me than studying education as a field. I'd hate to teach teachers; I want to teach students.
My mom was very supportive, fo course, and offered lots of good advice. She mentioned the iea of adult education, of writing as therapeutic exercise, and similar ideas. These were things I'd barely even considered before, but that suddenly struck me as being phenomenally interesting. This is sort of the way I've viewed every job I've ever had, as opportunities to see listen to people who've had harder lives than me talk about the ways they think, and the things they think about.