i hope not to end up like charlie

this is charlie. charlie is from madrid but has been living in bogota for over 20 years. he's been an english teacher in the system for about that time and i consider him a veteran. he has turned down jobs that i have tried to get. he was nice enough to take me under his wing when i got to my current school and has helped me a lot with the way things function there. he's one of the nicest guys you could ever meet, plus he a polyglot, knowing three languages fluently. he's a teacher, and i certainly hope not to end up like him after 20 years of teaching.

charlie is a classic case of a teacher who has given up and stopped caring. he's stopped caring about the job, the students, the teaching methods, the school administrators, the curricula, and everything else that comes along with being a teacher except the paycheck at the end of every month. (For you Simpson buffs, charlie's like Rev. Lovejoy and Ned Flanders is education, if you can recall that episode). he doesn't speak unless spoken to (which is a good quality to have in my opinion), he's a 'yes-man' doing whatever is asked of him without complaining or wondering why or whether it is the right thing to do. he keeps his head down and his nose clean. he's passive in every way and his students think he's a boring teacher. but he makes sure that the school pays him every month.

i may eat my words here but i don't think i'll end up like charlie. what i need to do is find a place where students are able to recognize when a teacher cares about his job and are able to respect the teacher for it. but the questions is is it a place? or is it an age group? or is it a culture? or is it a socioeconomic class? i haven't been to enough places or been teaching long enough to know if it exists. i can say this, when students backs are against the wall, that is when they learn. otherwise, from my experience here, a teacher is just another adult telling them what to do and occasionally spewing out information which they think is useless to them.