Being a teacher.

I want to become a teacher. Rather, I want to become a person to which people come and ask for help with things that I seemingly know more about. I am already such a person to some extent, and I want to become more of it.

There are multiple ways to becoming a teacher. There are multiple ways of conducting teaching as an activity.

I don’t want to teach in a school. I don’t want to become a professor and teach at university. I don’t want to teach as a full time assignment. I don’t want to teach something I’m not passionate about. I don’t want to teach for the sake of teaching. I don’t want to teach people who don’t want to learn about what I’m teaching.

All those things makes it impossible for me to go down the regular teaching road. It’s not plausible with the way I want to inspire learning in others. And so, I’ll have to find a new way.

I think it’s important to realise here that there’s a Hughe philosophy of learning that’s underneath all of this. It’s that in order to learn, we need to want it. I think that the single most important aspect of learning is the interest of learning. The second most important aspect of learning, in my opinion, is the context in which you’re learning.

In schools today, we’re doing a really good job forming a certain type of thinking. It’s a type of thinking that’s passive, and oriented around a standardised set of subjects and areas of which we need to learn certain bits. It can be how you’re supposed to shadow a drawing, what you should eat if you want to build muscles or the table of multiplication.

All of those things can be super interesting to an individual, but the context might be wrong. Or they’re completely uninterested about the subject, but the teacher is good and therefore they learn.

In the teaching that I want to conduct, I want to combine the two. That means all learning has to be voluntary. I, as a teacher, need to be flexible about the methods we use in order to learn. And I need to teach things that might be of interest to at least one other person.

I have, just to make this a bit more tangible, decided that I want to teach people about coffee. For starters, I need to educate myself in order to learn more about it. To do that, I know that I need to be in a context where people are talking about coffee a lot. I learn in a context where other people are equally or more eager to learn about the same thing as I am.

Then, I need to create that context for others. Some might want me to come home to them and show them how they can brew better coffee with their existing tools. Some might want to take barista corses. Some might just want to hang out for an afternoon, experimenting together with some suprevision. As I teacher, I think I need to be adaptable to the different contexts.

That’s what being a teacher ultimately is to me, to create a context in which people can learn exactly what they want to learn about whatever topic they’re interested in.

What are you interested in, and how can you become a teacher within that subject?