In my college years, I often lamented at length in my journals about so-called higher education being rarely more than an extension of high school. On some rare occasions, a professor would present more advanced and challenging material, but those happenings were few and far between. 

I was thinking about what my first class would be like as a professor. The first class assignment would be to take a piece of paper and write down the first question that comes to mind, no matter what the subject. One paper would come back with a big lone question mark on it. While the class would laugh, I’d reply that it’s actually the most brilliant question of all, what question should I be asking? Even if that wasn’t the intention, it is really the question that should be asked.

Why don’t teachers tell you that an essay is literally just asking a question, finding points to try and answer that question, and coming to a conclusion? That’s how I would teach as a professor no matter what the subject. There is no such thing as a stupid question, only a question that needs to be reworked to become a more powerful one.

Without a doubt, I’d receive questions like “when can we go home” or “why do I have to take this class” but while those seem like questions borne of boredom, they are simply questions that could be worded better. For example, “why do I want to go home so badly right now” and “why should I take this class” what do these questions have to do with English composition and literature? Everything. A question is a thesis.

Say someone asks a this or that question like McDonald’s or Taco Bell. It’s easy to come up with compare and contrast points for that. Both are cheap and fast. But McDonald’s offers no truly vegetarian options, thanks to using beef stock in pretty much everything. Taco bell has lots of veggie options. McDonald’s has lots of branded food items that puts them top of mind. Taco bell has fire sauce. These are the paragraphs of your essay. Then you have your conclusion. That in itself is an essay. Then you just have to organize it and voila. You’ve answered your own question.

An essay is an attempt to answer your own questions. People are not allowed to ask their own questions, unless they are what the professor wants to hear. The best education is when you let the students ask the questions because that way they become invested. Learning to ask better questions is the key to better understanding of not only subjects you want to know more about but also of your own thought processes. 

As an educator, I’ve always known that I probably wouldn’t last long in any sort of traditional role, due to the fact that I’d constantly be breaking rules and regulations of what a proper education would be considered to entail. But considering today you can get an education for free that is far superior to your average public education that awards you with a high school diploma, I figure there isn’t much point in being a primary or secondary school teacher other than allow kids to waste their time a bit more productively. 

College professorship, however, is an entirely different vocation. As the gatekeepers of invaluable college credit hours, professors have a responsibility that can easily be abused for the sake of amusement.