Sorry. I can't be your friend.

Something that I've started to realize more and more is that as a teacher, I can't really be friends with my students. When I first started teaching, I thought the best thing to do was to try to be everybody's friend and make the class really fun and happy. Well I still try to make the class really fun and happy, but a little less so and definitely not by becoming everyone's friend. It's kind of sad, but necessary I think.

So what's wrong with becoming friends with my students? Well the problem is that when a student sees me as a friend, that student starts to not take directions seriously. That student will be more likely to pay less attention, socialize with friends, not raise his/her hand, and etc. It's basically a calling card for bad behavior.

Realizing this as a teacher has actually changed the way I communicate with a lot of people outside of teaching. I used to always talk with my professors and authorities in a very casual, informal manner, as if they were my friend. This has also always been the way I conducted myself at interviews, and presentations. Talking to people as if they're my friend has always just felt the most natural to me, and as you can probably tell I hate "professionalism" because it seems so fake. I think talking to people as if they're my friend has generally worked in my favor, but I'm realizing that there needs to be a certain level of professionalism in order for information to be efficiently transferred from one body to the other. This is especially true for teaching.

As a student, I've always loved saying random comments during class because I always felt it contributed to the livelihood. But now as a teacher who has to deal with those comments from my students, I realized that they can be very distracting from the lesson. So now as a college student I'm much more cognizant of making random comments during class and I feel kind of like an asshole to many of my previous professors, and hope they read this post because I'm sorry. I didn't know how annoying I was.

In a previous post I had about icebreakers, you could probably see that I'm all about fun and games. Acting silly is one of my fortes. It's true that a critical part of teaching is making the class fun, but the real point of teaching is for the students to learn something. That might sound painfully obvious, but it's finally starting to really hit me.

So has my class turned into something like a memorial service? No, and I refuse to ever eliminate fun, because that's what keeps most students coming to class. But it's time to start finding that balance between serious and fun so that my students can not only have a good time, but get something meaningful out of their classes. So no, I can't be your friend.