For when you don't know.

     Please humor my foray into alliteration. Dr. Dave and Dr. Dee are blog post based Dr. Drews. For those of you who don't listen to Loveline as frequently as I do, you should. I have found that many young people, and plenty old for that matter, love having someone to go to whenever something is amiss with their bodies. Having that go to place is comforting, even if it is not used. WebMD could be a useful tool if it had a more personal touch, and if it would stop guessing caner. These experts have tons and tons of articles about life, family, and sex problems that many people encounter. It may be your job as a teacher to become a mentor and teacher in some of the areas where you have not been formally trained. When a life-changing situation occurs in your students lives, it could be in your best interest to refer them to people who are trained in dealing with the delicate human psyche. In the medical field, there are just too many things that you will never learn, but luckily, there are experts out there who can be reached with just one email.
     In the course of encouraging young people to be articulate, independent adults, we may find it necessary to have a trusted source for things not associated with social sciences. For the students, this is you, the educator. I don't like to think of myself as a professional student because a lot of people see it as derogatory, but I have seen that the people I trusted a lot of my personal feelings with were teachers. To a lot of people, going to your chemistry teacher for advice with women seems crazy, especially if he has had a couple of divorces. The point of all this is that if you want to teach, you have to be prepared to not just teach the humanities, but to teach humanity. You shouldn't treat yourself as a board-certified psychiatrist or anything, but there are far too many young people without trustworthy adults to help guide them. As I have found in my line of business, (I have worked in elementary schools for about five years), people love to see their kids connect with people with experience.
     Experience is the key here, when I tutored as a second job for a summer I told the parents that I could teach their kid anything. I meant it too, anything that was in my brain, I have learned to embark upon young people. I think some teachers are cool because they have that sense of youth in them that can easily translate into teachable moments. I may not know everything-although I frequently claim otherwise-I know where to safely redirect for the kids I work with. In an educational environment where class sizes are rising faster than we can take funding from them, our ability to be "just a teacher" will be greatly reduced. Finding and using these secondary teaching methods could prove to make you a great teacher.