Futures Traders

I don’t regularly have epiphanies in bars (stop laughing this instant, Anton) but the ones I do are more awesome than the sober kind. Case in point coming up after the break.

(Warning: the dialogue below has been exaggerated by 20% for dramatic effect)

So, a young lass at a certain bar once inquired about my occupation. Half-jokingly and half-facetiously I replied “Oh me? I’m in trading. Slave trading”

Eyes agog, she gasped. “Really? Slaves?! FOR REAL?!?”

Smugly buffing my fingernails against my ermine coat, I flashed her a smoldering look over my shoulder and deadpanned “Yes, I trade in people; their lives and futures”.

The moment those words left my mouth, I knew that they rung more true than I had intended. Not hard, granted that the whole thing was a drunken fiction but you get my point.

Teachers really are in futures trading. We assist our charges in trading up their futures for better ones by giving them the skills to function in society. We’re really in the business of lives.  As much as prisons officers are supposed to be captains of lives, we’re supposed to be the gardeners.

How many of our teachers’ philosophies and musings have lain latent in our minds till we, years on, encounter and experience enough to gain the context and insight required to allow them to germinate into a life-changing idea or realisation? Ought we not strive to do the same for our students? To take the macro, long-term view instead of the short-term one that simply emphasises silence in class and the regular completion of asinine homework? An education goes deeper beyond knowing the mechanism for the nitration of benzene or the exact chain of enzymes that convert glucose into acetyl-CoA.

I mean, how many of us have actually used anything we learnt in mathematics save, perhaps, probability and, sometimes, statistics in our everyday life? Economics can be very useful as a decision making tool, but how many of us think purely in terms of externalities and utility? Literature teaches us to see beauty in words, but how many of us actually read the texts with love instead of dissecting them with a clinical eye just because a test or reading is coming? Being able to explain how tornadoes form and how cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons are different from each other (clue: they aren’t) can be cool, but most of Geography seems ultimately doomed to be confined to the damp, dank corners of the brain.

Unless, of course, the student ends up becoming a professional mete0rologist. A number of our students might actually become professional Chemists, Biologists, Statisticians, Mathematicians, Economists etc but even as they specialise in one field, their masteries of the others would reasonably begin to atrophy. Why should anyone with an interest to pursue a career in Applied Nanotechnology even care about History at the ‘O’ Levels?

Adolescents are plastic, idealistic, inexperienced beings. They have but a nebulous idea of what they want to achieve in their life and how they ought to go about working towards those goals. That is where teachers truly come into play. We show them possible futures and give them tiny nudges to guide their trajectories, all the while making sure that their minds remain as diversified as swiss-army knives until they find an area of expertise that they’re willing to forsake all others for.

What we’re really doing is training the minds of our students to be strong yet pliable, open and yet discerning. They need to learn how to adapt their minds to handle different subjects and to recognise that good grades aren’t necessarily corollaries of intelligence: grades are naught but signals that the individual bearing them has an active mind and a good measure of discipline.

We also instill in our students moral codes to live their lives by and plant seeds of inspiration that might take a lifetime to germinate. We teach them that genius rarely amounts to anything without hard work and perseverance (99% perspiration, anybody?) and that these two values are ultimately key to carrying any day.

It’s all to easy to take teaching as a day-to-day affair without any overarching theme, but I think we would be doing our students a major disservice if we did not keep this mission statement in mind at all times.

-Marc