Teachers Make the Worst Students

I just got back home from my grad classes at LMU. It's 10:45pm, a little pass my bedtime, but I must blog about what just happened tonight. So it's the usual grad classes, but one of the classes I am taking this semester is Business Education, which I am very excited about.

I went into the class with full excitement; I get to learn about school finances, budget plans, cash flows, etc. The professor starts doing a brief introduction about the class and gives us a little about her background. She holds an MBA at Pepperdine, used to work for Sony, and is now working for a charter business organization that does the business end of schools (budgeting, HR, expenses, everything not instructional focused). This is the first time she is teaching a university level class. Class seems pretty interesting, but what was weird was that she didn't print out the syllabus for us. Mistake #1.

After an hour of her lecturing about the class, we, all TFA teachers, thought it was time to go, but the professor insists that she followed the rules and keep us until 9:45pm. Mistake #2. That was when everyone started to get a little frustrated. The professor proceeded on explaining about the books and the course again...the time was 8:30pm. Everyone was literally on their laptops doing their own work and I was pretty sure no one was paying attention. The professor had no objective, her syllabus that she was explaining was vague, she was dragging the class, talking and talking. As you may have heard, teachers make the worst students, especially TFA teachers.

An email thread was created and at the end of the class, 41 emails were sent; some of which were hilarous. Anyways, we started to give her a hard time because she had no structure or point for the class. She forced us to stay until the very end and damn, I need to drive home for 45 minutes and wake up at 5:30am tomorrow! She was wasting our time! We were annoyed and frustrated. What happened for the next hour was us giving her feedback of the class. Let me tell you; it was nice. At one point, I felt really uncomfortable and felt bad for the professor. Basically, if my students did what we did tonight, I would have quited. But this goes with what I believe in, if you don't have a plan, the students will have a plan for you. I hope she learned her lesson.

Anyways, the relevation that I made tonight was the simple fact that teaching is not easy. A legit business person, probably recognized in the business world, decided that she wanted to teach. What she probably didn't know is that teaching is hard. Cliff told me that people in the business world give teacher no respect. After tonight, business people need to respect teachers. It's no easy task. See for yourself. Come teach a class and see how long you survive. Goodnight world!