The Family Business

 This afternoon, when I went to the pool for my daily swim, I ran across one of the kids who I had seen lifeguarding for the last two  years.  I had not seen him since the pool shut down in mid-August for its annual maintenance period.  I was pleasantly surprised to hear him say that he was into another degree and even more pleased when he said he was at Teacher's College here at Brock.  It turned out that he is on his way into another practice teaching block and will be in a classroom of a teacher I know very well.  Then, he also said his supervisor was someone who I also happened to remember from a long time ago.  When I told him what my background in Education was, he was flabbergasted.  He had no idea who I really was or what I did, which is not something I made known to him. When he told me that his parents were both teachers, I welcomed him to the "family business".  It has always been fun, as a teacher educator, to meet so many people who were attending our program because their family had more than a couple of teachers.  I found myself reflecting on the number of people who had their kids come with them before school began and had  the helping hang paper on bulletin boards and sharpen pencils and distribute books on desks in preparation for opening day.  I can hear students tell me that those experiences led them to think about teaching as a professional career choice. Then there were those who said that when they played with other kids, they inevitably played school and they were invariably the teacher.   There have been a lot of studies pondering what formative experiences led best to successful teachers.  I cannot say for sure what works well but one thing I have always thought about kids whose parents were teachers and administrators, they already know what the rhythm of their lives will be. They know also how two teachers successfully or unsuccessfully manage to share a career life together. I told my students that in any such coupling, one person has to be really good listener because there is not enough psychic energy left at the end of the day for two people to share all their frustrations. It just never works.