My Response to The Hobart Shakespearians by Kendell Miller

             I always thought it would be amazing to be a teacher. Teachers have the chance to shape young minds. The main thing that always stopped me from pursuing that was that I’ve only ever seen children treating their teachers badly. I’ve never seen kids treat a teacher the way that the children in the film treated Rafe Esquith. They respected him and they truly loved having him as a teacher. I’ve also never seen a teacher that loved teaching like Rafe Esquith does. Every teacher that I had in elementary school acted like it was a burden teaching children. They didn’t love their jobs like Rafe did.

            All the teachers that I had in elementary school were basically the same. They came to work taught us what we needed to know and then went home. They didn’t put in the extra work to make sure that what they were teaching was really understood. It was memorization for testing. The teacher would tell us what we needed to know. It didn’t really matter if we learned it just that we could recite it. It felt as though we were burdens. That if we acted up or didn’t understand something we were making their jobs more difficult. The quote that stood out to me from the film was “bad days don’t make bad children.” I wish that the teachers I had growing up believed the same thing. Once you were seen as a bad kid, that’s all you were seen as. It felt like you no longer were viewed as having potential or as being smart, you were just viewed as a problem child. That reputation followed you through school. I didn’t have a teacher that really cared or inspired me until I was a freshman in high school. She made me realize what a teacher should be like. They should be invested in the student and making the student better.

            In the next year I would like to do better in my classes. The first year of college kind of kicked my butt so I’d like to make the second year much better. I know that to achieve this I’ll have to want it and work hard for it. It won’t be something that just happens. I'll have to study hard to achieve it.