What Would I Teach? Revamping Education With Some Hindsight.

My parents are both educators. My dad is a business school and my mom teaches elementary ESL. My older sister even tried student teaching for a while. I’ve always thought about teaching. First it was a brief period of flirting with Teach For America during my senior year, and since then I’ve thought “Before I retire, maybe I’ll go back and teach high school math.”

As if it’s just that easy to become the amazing teacher I would want to be.

I have a bunch of friends who are teachers and I recently asked one of them how they would resculpt the curriculum (from scratch!) if there was no history or text parameters to teach to. How would we prepare students for modern life?  No set guidelines around English, Social Studies, Math, Science, hell… I’m forgetting the rest of them. I know that I’d want to teach a bunch of the things I’ve tried to learn since my schooling finished. I’m thinking about starting to blog about them.  Here’s a quick list off the top of my head:

• Finances – What does it mean to “handle” your finances? Why are so many people so woefully unprepared? Where do we learn to do this?
• How To Learn – This could be a huge topic, but I think memory is a great place to start, super easy to learn and widely applicable. It’s also a window into figuring out how YOU learn best.
• Persuasive language – Rhetoric. God how I wish I had done debate in high school. I’ve implicitly learned a lot since then, but there’s no real playground for trial and error outside of everyday experiences. There’s no completely safe “practice zone”. I believe the ability to persuade others is one of the most important skills you can learn. It affects your career, relationships, your  belief system, everything.
• Negotiation – I’ve recently been getting into this one because I’ve spent the last 2 years doing a lot of it. I’ve only recently realized that it has some distinct differences to just being persuasive. Part of this is just learning to always ask for what you want, and always negotiate.
• Realistic Health – I spent 20 years as an endurance athlete (no regrets!) but I really would like to focus on health goals that are both fun and set me up for long term health as opposed to fun at the expense of my body.
• Music and 2nd Languages – I’m not an expert enough to teach these, but I do know that I’ve greatly changed my opinion on both of these post college. Both can be learned efficiently and expertly as an adult, which is contrary to most people’s opinions.