This is just my own personal preference in lifestyle obviously, but one of the thoughts I can't stand is how repetitive the life of a modern teacher must be, the dread of just living year after year on loop teaching the same thing but with no progression and not even the same students to share the journey. To me, the thought of it is like being trapped in Groundhog Day. You are the rock that never moves while all your students pass you by. Fifty years can pass, your students already having lived entire lives, and when they come back to visit, you're still there doing the same thing, as if part of the historical scenery itself.
I kind of wish there was a more old-fashioned approach, where you and your teacher are both a team growing and learning together until the student finally one day becomes equal or even surpasses the teacher. What we have instead with schools/colleges is more an assembly line where students churn in and out, the teachers sometimes not even remembering the names of students they just taught last year, and the conversation always being one directional of the teacher just unloading their knowledge to the student. In college, it's even worse with you not having the same teacher for even 6 months and that teacher literally only clocking in one hour a week to talk on stage.
It would be so much more exciting if being part of a school was more like being on a team training to face the real world together. That English teacher, instead of just reading and grading papers year after year, could actually be writing novels and expecting students to one day carry on the story. That computer professor, instead of just explaining the same intro to computers year after year, could actually be working on an entirely new technology on which the students are being trained to one day help complete. Instead of just talking about a subject, the same material in perpetuity, we learn as much as the teacher knows so far and then keep discovering more together.
It means that by becoming a student, you become dedicated to one day working with and carrying on the work you study, but maybe that would be for better. I think I would have liked that kind of life more.
