teacher re-education camp

Okay, so I've been in education classes for the last few weeks, and this week, I'm taking too simultaneously. My fifth chakra has been acting up lately, so I'm going to vent.

I KNOW that I can be a better teacher. I have appreciated my Reading in the Content Area class for that very reason. It has shown me some concrete steps that I can take to be a better teacher. However, I am wary of teacher-teachers who believe that in order to be a better teacher, said teacher needs to BELIEVE the correct things about teaching.

Now, as someone who actively rejects the idea of enlightenment, or higher levels of consciousness, I find this hard to swallow. It strikes me of this odd blend of modernist positivism with Christian ethics. If you have FAITH in the good (or subscribe to the correct CREED of goodness), then you will be MEASURABLY better. I mean seriously, isn't that what so many people in today's society honestly believe? Shouldn't there be a beautiful ambiguity between faith and reason, between creeds and theories?

The whole idea that one has a world-life philosophy upon which one acts is childish. For example, I believe that I should be nice to my wife, but I certainly am not always as nice as I could be or believe that I should be. Oftentimes, I think am I saying to her (or to anybody) what I mean, but that meaning is lost in the ambiguity and brokenness of my words. Of course, judging myself based on my world-life philosophy is useful, but then I run into the thorny question of what is nice? I could then go ahead and create a philosophical definition for nice, but then I will spend the rest of my life chasing down categories.

The problem is, the sages have known for years, that language cannot contain our thoughts as correctly as we want. I suspect that language cannot even describe the universe as correctly as we want. Therefore, any statement of philosophies will only be a hollow echo of an original idea, which in itself, is only a piece and not the whole of the universe, which, in its wholeness, can never be grasped by the human mind.

On another note, how about this piece of tragicomic irony. The Shuttle Discovery returned safely to this terrestrial sphere just as Israel invaded Lebanon. Yet, almost 3 years ago, the Space Shuttle Columbia exploded somewhere over Palestine, Texas carrying an Israeli astronaut. I'm going to presume to read this augury as meaning that humans are locked into our selfish, arrogant, and sinful nature, which we cyclically transcend and affirm.

How's that for a world-life philosophy?