I want to be a teacher because I like the pace of life that the school work calendar provides. The holidays in June, July and August gave me an opportunity to think, research and write - to summarize my experiences for future teaching.

I want to be a teacher because teaching is always an ever-changing job. Even when my teaching materials are the same, I am always changing my teaching methods, but more importantly, my students are always changing.

I want to be a teacher because I like the freedom to make mistakes, the freedom to learn, and the freedom to inspire myself and my students. As a teacher, I am my own boss. Even if I asked my first-year students to compile a textbook on how to write essays, who could say no? Such a course might fail completely, but we all learn something from failure.

I want to be a teacher because I like asking questions that students have to think hard to answer. The world is full of correct answers to lame and weird questions. In teaching, I sometimes intentionally avoid orthodox questions.

I want to be a teacher because I like to learn. Indeed, the reason I feel alive in my teaching career is because I am always learning. One of the most important discoveries in my life and career is that the reason I am the best teacher is not because of how much I know, but rather because of my love of learning.

I want to be a teacher because I know how to free myself and my students from the traditional closed learning of the ivory tower and enter the real world outside. I once taught a course called "Surviving Yourself in a High-Tech Society." Fifteen of my students have read Emerson, Thoreau, and Housley. They insist on taking notes. They wrote term papers.

However, I also founded a company and bought a cheap house with a bank loan. After the students renovated it by themselves, at the end of the semester, we bought the house and paid off the house. Loan, income tax paid and dividends distributed.

Of course this is not an ordinary English class as you might imagine. But fifteen would-be lawyers, accountants, and businessmen suddenly found themselves looking at Thoreau's "Walden" in a whole new light. They learned why he went to the forest, how he built his cabin, and why he appreciated his experience so much that he wanted to tell the world about it. They also understood why he finally left the forest. He had already tasted the waters of Lake Wollden. Now it's time to try another drink.

I want to be a teacher because teaching has given me many drinks to taste, many forests to enter and leave, many good books to read, and many ivory tower-like realms and real-world experiences to explore. Teaching has given me the pace of progress, a varied life and challenges, and the opportunity to continue learning.

Despite this, I forgot to mention the most important reason why I want to be a teacher.

My first PhD student was named Vicki. She was a very capable young man whose scholarship application was thwarted by her failure to pass a literature class. But she diligently researched and wrote a dissertation on a little-known fourteenth-century poet. She finally completed the paper and sent it to a prestigious magazine for publication. Except for occasionally consulting me a few times, she did it almost entirely by herself. When she completed her thesis, defended it, got a job, and won a scholarship to Harvard University to turn her thesis into a monograph, I was pleased to know that, as my student, she It took root, sprouted and grew vigorously.

Another student of mine is named George. He is one of the smartest students I have ever taught. He initially studied engineering, but then he switched to English because he finally realized that he was more interested in people than things. He remained in school until he received his master's degree. Now he teaches English in a senior high school.

There is another student named Gina. She dropped out of school for a time, but some of her classmates brought her back because they wanted her to see the end of the self-actualization project. She is back and she is still my student. As her teacher, she told me that she later became so interested in the conditions of the poor in the suburbs that she devoted herself to the subject as a human rights lawyer.

There is another student named Jacka. She is a very tidy person and has a learning talent that most people, even those who have studied analytics, cannot match. Jacka decided to stop high school and go straight to college.

These are the reasons why I want to be a teacher. These students are growing and changing before my eyes. Being a teacher is like creating life. I can see the clay figure I have conceived beginning to breathe. There is nothing more exciting than being able to see the breath of life so close to your own eyes.

By not being a teacher, I might be able to gain status, money and power, but I am rich. I get paid to do what I enjoy doing most: reading and studying, talking to people, and discovering or asking questions like, "What does it mean to be truly rich?"

I There is also power. I have the power to draw attention to others, to develop interesting topics, to ask hard-to-answer questions, to praise a bold answer, to condemn concealment of truth, to recommend books to students, to point the way forward.

Do I care about any other power?

But being a teacher does provide something besides money and power: it provides "love." Not just the love of learning, the love of books, the love of ideas, but the love that a teacher can feel when those rare students step into the teacher's life and begin to breathe. Perhaps the word "love" is not quite appropriate here, and the word "magic" is more appropriate.

I became a teacher because I lived among people who began to breathe, and I sometimes even felt my own breath in their breath.