Didn’t John Keating – Robin Williams’s character in Dead Poet Society – inspire a generation of teachers who believe that they’re sole purpose is to free students from the conformist bonds of the classroom? Who are we to say that a teacher can’t inspire? And boiling teaching down to a transactional, capitalist enterprise of toil for the sake of cash is cynical – I reject the premise.

I’m being partly facetious, but the idea that teaching is not inspirational is reductive – for the most part it is what you say it is, minor, transactional, a craft barely exercised, but that is not what any teacher aims to be. We should be realistic about what we can accomplish in the classroom, but the idea that we should not reach for more, hope for more at the very least, is absurd. The money might, at times, be what gets me out of bed to grade papers and lesson plan. The money is not  what makes me care about the problems of each individual student. The money is not what makes me hope that my students will be happy, successful people as though they were my own brothers and sisters. The money is not what makes me laugh with them or cry with them. Of all the occupations, teaching is the one where money is valued least. I have never met a person who became a teacher for money.

Now that I’m through polemicizing, I would point out that this prompt works best when we consider the least worst outcome for our teaching. At best we do inspire, but at worst we should do no harm – no harm to our students’ feelings about our subject and no harm to our students’ beliefs about themselves. It would pain me to find out that a student came into my class with a love of English and left despising the subject. It would equally pain me to find out that something I did, through the curriculum or personally, caused a student to lose self-confidence. The least I can do is do no harm.  Even if not every student gets some joy from my class, none will be pained by it.