After work Thursday, I played racquetball against one of the employees. He has watched me for several months and decided he wanted to play me. Although I had to work for it, after I beat him 15-1 twice in a row, I asked him if he wanted to know what to do to play better against me. After I explained those things, I said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you how to beat me. It must be the teacher in me.” He then proceeded to play, and this time improved to 15-9.
You see, far too many so-called teachers view the classroom as an exercise in ego. If you are a teacher but you aren’t smarter than a fifth grader, that might be a problem. However, I don’t see who benefits if I prove that I know more than the students. That’s how it works. They come to me to learn things I know. Keeping them there however makes zero sense to me. If the next generation is not smarter than we, then we cease to progress as a civilization.
My young friend may one day beat me handily. This is because although I can explain to him how to play better against me, he probably lacks experience or desire to do in kind. Most professionals in sports maintain their hegemony by taking advantage of any weaknesses revealed by their opponents while obfuscating their own. They do this because their livelihood depends on it in part, and so they are unseated only when someone who is naturally better supersedes them or someone younger passes them as they age. This unnecessarily retards our progress as a society.
It’s about ego for far too many people. While they talk of community and shared sacrifice, they are secretly, clandestinely seeking to carve out a niche for themselves…their own…their precious. At work, in school, at church, and in families, I see the older generation desperate to maintain itself and hold the rising one back so that they look better. Are we really that insecure that we cannot see another person succeed without automatically inferring that their success makes us lesser? Sometimes these subsequence successes stand on something someone else already did. It does not make your accomplishments less; it made theirs possible.
I don’t know why I tell people the things I do. I don’t know why I tell them the truth and you the truth in person, on this blog, and every other opportunity afforded me. It must be the teacher in me. Is there a teacher in you?
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