Q:This is going to sound weird, but bear with me. I went to community college, transferred to a university, and am getting a (some say "meaningless") degree which will (probably) bring few job prospects. But here's the thing: I loved community college. And I love being right about things. Is it crazy to want to teach at a community college for a little while? Being someone on the inside of that world, what's it like?

hkast

Aw hell you went and got me started.

I wouldn’t trade my campus for any other. I mean that in every way I can.

Community college is a lot of things. Not the least of which is a high school with cigarettes.

But it’s also a place overflowing with people who are really the best kind of people. People returning from wars who want to start a new civilian life. People laid off who want to start a new professional life. People learning things for the sake of learning things.

There is the obvious undercurrent of fetuses who have no fucking clue which way is up or why they are even there beyond their parents telling them to be. There is a massive population of people who are wasting a massive universe of time. But that’s how this song goes. They’re in the middle of actually growing up. Doing the maturing they thought they did at 13, then thought they did at 18, then realized they never did at 26.

Then I see them again when they’re 27.

And you know what? They are amazing people by then. They learned things about life and about themselves the university kids don’t always learn. They had work experience, and life experience, and experience experience. Because they are working to stay fed while still making time to improve themselves.

There are very few teachers who hate American public college-level academia as much as I do. And my students know it. It can be machine that is designed to discourage and grind people until they think they are idiots. Because it’s a system that folds algebra into an art major.

We’re better than that as people. But we are lazier than that as creators of systems that make creative and balanced people. We think the general education creates the balance while time and again it proves it does not.

The students know it. And I know it. Because I was one of them. I still am. I take courses when I can, but it’s usually piano or something. I’ll just YouTube whatever else I want.

I also YouTube piano tutorials.

I tell my students they don’t need me to tell them things. Everything they could ever want to know that is knowable is either waiting on the internet or waiting to be put there after someone discovers it using things they read on the internet.

They don’t need me to tell them any of that.

They CHOSE me to tell it  to them. To sift through all of that for them and make it a neat little row of ducks for them to… whatever you do with a row of ducks.

I don’t even demand that they listen to me. Seriously.

So they do.

So. It’s with that relationship with my students and the aforementioned love of the experience and the determined students in general that I have shown up to every day of work for 13 years and loved my job. Even when I didn’t.

I’m not cut out for the universities. They would hate someone like me. And I’m sure as hell not cut out to teach high school.

Community college is just a perfect fit, is all.

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