教师，是一个崇高的职业。因为教师是为社会培养人才的园丁，是人类灵魂的工程师。那么，当一名老师又能给教师自己带来什么呢？

　　Why I Teach

　　I teach because I like the pace of the academic calendar. June, July, and August offer an opportunity for reflection, research and writing.

　　I teach because teaching is a profession built on change. When the material is the same, I change — and, more important, my students change.

　　I teach because I like the freedom to make my own mistakes, to learn my own lessons, to stimulate myself and my students. As a teacher, I’m my own boss. If I want my freshmen to learn to write by creating their own textbook, who is to say I can’t? Such courses may be huge failures, but we can all learn from failures.

　　I teach because I like to ask questions that students must struggle to answer. The world is full of right answers to bad questions. While teaching, I sometimes find good questions.

　　So teaching gives me pace and variety, and challenge, and the opportunity to keep on learning①.

　　However, the most important reasons why I teach are that my students grow up and change in front of me. Some have become doctoral students with excellent success and found good jobs; some have become interested in the urban poor and served as civil rights lawyers; some have decided to finish high school and go to college.

　　But teaching offers something besides money and power: it offers love. Not only the love of learning and of books and ideas, but also the love that a teacher feels for that rare student who walks into a teacher’s life and begins to breathe. Perhaps love is the wrong word: magic might be better.

　　I teach because, being around people who are beginning to breathe, I occasionally find myself catching my breath with them.

　　［294 words］