Our reason for teaching

Benjamin D. Wright Department of Education University of Chicago Chicago, Illinois XW lhatever we may claim about how and why we finally got into teaching, we know we came under the spell of our vocation early. We began learning how to be teachers when we began school and we studied teaching, however inadvertantly, for 16 years or more. Our education for teaching and our idea of school is deeply and irrevocably influenced by our own school experiences, by our successes and failures and, most of all, by our own teachers. Our professional identity, our teaching style, cannot escape the sway of deep and ancient wishes, conscious or not, to consumate old relationships with teachers we once loved and hated. We cannot resist recreating in our own behavior heroes whose teaching once won our admiration and envy. Nor can we free ourselves from the awful force of even deeper compulsions to undo and master the dread and humiliation caused in us by tyrants we feared.1 Our classroom behavior reflects our motives for becoming teachers. But these motives, as with so much of human behavior, tend to remain unexamined. Sometimes they impel us into actions which are destructive to children and to classroom life. Even when our behavior is benign, it may be less effective than our ideals would have it. And this is painful, because most of us believe we have chosen our profession in order to make life better for children. The press of classroom life may make a running examination of motives difficult. Where in the course of a busy day will we find quiet moments in which to think over what we are doing and why? But afterwards we can reflect on what has happened and on what we have done, not only about it, but also to bring it about. When things go wrong it is hard to forget them. Then some awareness of our own motives and even more of their roots in identifications with our own teachers can lead us to discover alternatives that may mitigate what seems on reflection to have been ineffective if not downright wrong.2