Tag motivation

I Did It My Why

Dusty 1 Comment
when admin says remember your why - Tony Stark Eye Roll Meme Generator

It’s inservice season!

Of course that should be the time of year, as the old joke goes, when we all get to hunt inservices, but it just means that this is the time of year when teachers go back to work in order to pre-game before the students arrive. (Yes, if you’re wondering, we’ll be drinking – but not enough. Never enough.)

If you are wondering – or, if you are one of my fellow teachers, which means your mouth is hanging open and you are cussing foully at the very thought of this – yes, this is absurdly early. In fact I am writing this at the end of the first half-week of inservice: this year I went back to school on July 16th. I kept seeing memes from teacher meme accounts that joked about our general outrage over Back to School sales happening now, with some kind of How-dare-you caption or comment that included the phrase, “It is JULY!” And though I share that outrage, every time I saw it I had to just sigh. Because not only am I back to work in the middle of July, but I will actually have students in July: classes this year start on Tuesday, July 29th. Thereby spelling the doom of that last vestige of the past advantages of being a teacher: it used to be a steady job, that was respected and appreciated, and which offered good benefits and a lovely, long summer vacation; now none of that is true, at least outside of the wealthier blue states.

But at least we’re still badly paid. So that tradition goes on.

Whenever I think about inservice – which I try not to do whenever I am not in the middle of it, but when I am in the middle of it, I always find myself stuck in uncomfortable chairs in rooms full of people who will look askance at me if they do not actually accuse me of disrespectful misbehavior should I have the audacity to distract myself from the pointless and condescending lecture being presented as helpful instruction, and so I end up spending quite a bit of inservice time pondering in silence the meaning of various available abstractions like this one – I wonder: What is inservice? (Also Why am I here? And Is there value in suffering?) It’s a strange word, after all: is it intended to differentiate this process from some other system called outservice? Which, frankly, if the only difference between inservice and outservice is that outservice is carried out in some place other than the school building, I’ll still take that one every time. And whether the service is in or it is out: who is being serviced? Am I and my fellow teachers the recipients of said service, like cars out of tune? Or are we the ones servicing something or someone else? If it is the teachers performing the service, what (who?) are we servicing, and why?

The ostensible answer is that inservice is meant to provide teachers with time and training to help us prepare for the upcoming school year; so essentially, it is the first one: we teachers are rolling into the garage like smoke-belching, backfiring, broken-down jalopies (Not entirely inaccurate), and the mechanics tune us up to get us ready for the race about to begin. I’m not sure what that makes the students, who are not the drivers and not quite passengers – maybe the cargo? Maybe the road we are driving on? – but I think that’s taking the metaphor too far. This lens does bring into clarity a number of obnoxious things that happen during inservice, not the least of which is: remembering my why.

There are themes that run throughout inservice everywhere, always, and which return every year, like a repeating motif in a Beethoven symphony, or like a recurring nightmare; one of these is the certainty that someone, almost certainly someone who does not teach, will ask the teachers to remember their why.

Why do we teach? Why do we take on this difficult and underappreciated job? Why do we come back to it year after year? Is it like returning to an abusive relationship? Is it like trauma that hides behind a memory block, as is supposed to happen with women who go through natural childbirth and then have to forget how incredibly painful the experience is or they would never have any more children?

As I have never given birth, nor been in an abusive relationship other than working in education, I cannot say. I will say that I remember, every year, how awful the previous year was – and also how wonderful it was, at times.

Which brings me to this year, and the current inservice season, and the direction – which was indeed delivered last week, by a presenter who is not a teacher – to remember my why.

Last year was bad. It wasn’t my worst year – that will always be 2011-2012, when I was working through a recession and a state investigation and a union contract negotiation in which I was the lead negotiator (And it says something that 2012 was the year I won Teacher of the Year for my school district in St. Helens, Oregon) – but it was bad. I spent a fair amount of time last year thinking about, and looking for, jobs that were not teaching jobs. That’s how bad it was: it changed my why into a What the hell am I doing here?, a question that is much less conducive to being a good teacher, and so not one that will be recognized at most inservice training sessions, even though surely many teachers at those sessions are asking that question, repeatedly, sometimes out loud, though under our breaths, so we don’t get dirty looks.

But here I am, one more time – my 26th – starting a new school year, about to teach high school English to a new (Well, partly new; partly familiar, which is at least part of the problem) cohort of students. And I found myself this past week thinking, genuinely wondering, Why?

Why am I teaching? Still? Why am I doing this to myself?

I don’t have an answer, not an immediate one. On some level, I don’t want to be here any more, don’t want to be teaching, don’t want to be teaching at the school where I have been teaching for the last 11 years. But that, too, is not the whole answer, and the whole answer is not immediately obvious in that context, either.

So let’s talk about it.

Why am I here? Why am I teaching?

First of all, most clearly and fundamentally, I’m here because I need a job. If I lived in a different kind of society – one that I think would be better in countless ways – that did not define a person’s value by their economic activity, then I would not be a teacher, at least not a classroom teacher. I have often thought I would like to teach the way Socrates did: at dinner parties, in conversations with interested parties, or out on the streets with random passersby; obviously I couldn’t do that for money, but I think I’d be pretty good at it. But I don’t live in that society, I live in this individualistic capitalist one, and so I must work for money so I can have a house and food and air conditioning, all the vital necessities of life. It’s possible I could survive without a job, but my level of misery would go up exponentially, even over what I went through, what I go through, as a teacher. So I work, rather than become homeless and starve on the street.

But does it need to be this job? At the moment, that answer is close to a definite yes, because my wife, who was also a teacher last year, and who had a far worse year than I did, lost her job to budget cuts at the end of last year; as she is working to build her entrepreneurial endeavors, it falls to me to provide a steady income and health insurance; because teachers are generally more valuable as we gain experience, our pay goes up every year and then drops precipitously if we change schools or school districts – I have done this twice, the first time losing about 20% of my annual pay and the second time 40% — so that means I need to stay in this job, rather than get another teaching position. That wasn’t an easy or a simple decision: I applied for, and could have gotten, a job teaching in a different school that would have earned me about 30% less than I make now; but I just couldn’t afford the drop in pay. So here I am. (It does help that I have many dear friends at this school, and that some of my students are lovely people. But it only helps, it doesn’t make the decision easy. It’s not the why.)

It is possible I could change jobs entirely, even change industries; but because most jobs pay more with experience, like teaching does, I would have to start at the bottom of the scale, and that is generally also less than I make as a teacher, even if the upper end of pay would be more. I am also painfully aware that the current political power structure puts continuing health insurance across changes in employers at serious risk of ending, which makes me doubly unwilling to leave my current job for a new one. Any job that would pay as much as or more than I make teaching would require additional training and/or certification, which makes them possibilities for the future, but not for now. (Also, I am 51, so starting a whole new career at the bottom and working my way up is both less attractive and also less likely than it would have been 20 years ago. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.)

But of course, I could do those things. I could get a job in marketing, or in public relations, or in corporate training. (I could become one of the people who provide inservice to teachers, but I would really have to hate myself to do that.) Especially if I and my family moved states, to one that had a generally higher payscale for professional jobs, I could find something that provided the same approximate income. Yet here I am, back teaching again. So there’s more reason for my returning to teaching than just necessity, more than just money. I will also point out that, if I just wanted to receive my paycheck and cared about nothing else, it would be fairly easy for me to keep my job despite becoming a terrible teacher, because it is in fact quite hard to fire bad teachers. So long as I didn’t hit or harass one of my students, I could treat my job very differently from how I treat it now, how I have always treated it, so that even though it was the same job, it would be a very different experience.

Let me be a little specific. I teach English to high school students, and I do it well. I make literature both understandable and interesting to my students – or at least I create an opportunity for them to find literature both understandable and interesting. I make the class as valuable and entertaining an experience as I can, as much of the time as I can – and that’s a good amount of the time (though of course the experience of my class is subjective and I don’t doubt that some students think I do a terrible job of teaching, and/or that my class is boring as hell. But mostly, they don’t think that, not if they pay attention and try.). I work very hard to achieve that: I spend hours and hours thinking about what I am going to teach and how, hours and hours preparing materials and assignments and activities, and then when it is time to go and teach those things, I show up, every day, as ready as I can be to teach the material to the students I have. I ignore the inconveniences and frustrations of my daily work, of my classes and my situation, and do my best to treat every class period as an opportunity for both progress and also fun. I try to learn as much as I can about my individual students, both so that I can teach them better and so I can show them the respect they are due as human beings who are as wonderful and valuable as every other human being, despite being adolescents (That’s not a dig, not really; adolescence is miserable, and all of us react to that misery by inflicting misery on others. I did it too. I don’t blame them for it: but it can be very hard to deal with them while they work their way through it.). I try to be as honest and vulnerable and trusting with them with my own genuine self as I can be, again so that I can teach them better and so I can show them the respect of being real with them, so they can trust me, so they can work with me.

The fact that I do that, that I have done that every year, is part of the reason why I had a bad year last year, and part of why I don’t want to do this any more: because my students last year did not generally return my respect and my openness. They did not listen or value my honesty and vulnerability, and they did not show me the respect I deserve as a fellow human being, let alone as a teacher who has some ability to affect their lives, possibly for the better. They mostly didn’t disrespect me maliciously, just being teenagers in this modern world; but it was hard to remember that and to keep caring about them and keep trying to be the kind of teacher I want to be with them while they treated me with callous indifference. There were many times, for instance, when I would ask my students about something, and they would ask me what I thought or what my experience was in regards to that idea or situation, and while I was answering the question they asked me, they would not listen: they would turn away and have side conversations, or look at their phones or Chromebooks, or leave the room, because they were bored. Not because they hated me and wanted to insult me, but just because they didn’t care, and they didn’t feel like they needed to show me the respect of their attention, even as I answered the question or gave the explanation they asked for. So as I said, not malicious, but nonetheless hurtful, and hard to deal with. And this year, I will have many of those same students back again. Will they treat me more respectfully? Will they listen to me when I talk, either as their teacher or as a fellow human being?

Probably not. But I am willing to try.

I don’t have to: I could assign them readings, and questions, and maybe videos or audio files of literature – particularly non-fiction, which is what my administrators want me to focus on anyway, as it is the heart of the testing that produces the data that is the obsession of all administrators everywhere –  and I could sit at my desk and monitor their online activity to ensure they were on task. To my school, that would be considered teaching, to a degree sufficient for me to keep my job and my current pay, which is not really related to my success or failure in actually teaching my students. If I produced data that was better than what I currently engender with my involved, honest, human, active, interactive teaching, then I would be even more secure in my job. I might even get a little bonus money if their test scores went up. And it would be so easy. Especially if I just had AI design my “lessons” for me. And grade their assignments.

I choose not to do that. I choose to take the much more difficult path, which does not necessarily make my job more secure, and which definitely does not produce the best test scores. And why do I choose that, you might ask?

That’s the Why worth thinking about.

I teach the way I do because I don’t just teach for money, and I don’t ever teach for test scores. I think that my teaching methods help students to get better at understanding literature and at explaining their understanding in writing, and so higher test scores should be the result of my methods; but those test scores are not my why. If anything I sometimes, perversely and against my own best interests, want those scores to go down while my students’ knowledge and abilities improve, for the data to become less reflective of my students’ actual learning and abilities. Because I want my students – and also my school and my community and my society – to care less about test scores and measurable progress data. Ideally they would not care about it at all, ever; and my hope is that when students grow and learn in my class, and know that they grow and learn in my class, and everyone around them knows that they grow and learn in my class, and then those test scores don’t improve, or even go down, then it shows the truth: that test scores do not measure what matters in education. Test scores and measurable progress data are the wrong focus for educators, because they put the focus on the wrong thing, especially in my subject: English as a subject of study is not about measurable progress in discrete skills. There is no “mastery” in English. It is about growing: growing as a person, as a thoughtful person, as a person who thinks about the world and our place in it, who is curious about the world, who is appreciative of the world, and who cares about the humans who live in it with them.

I want my students to be that. It will make them better people, with better lives, in a better world. I want to make that happen. So I am willing to work for it. Even though it’s hard. I’ve worked for it, worked hard, every day and every week and every month and every year, for coming up on three decades.

Last year, and to a lesser extent the few years before that, it didn’t work as well as I thought it should. My students did not grow as much as I wanted them to. Partly because they did not pay attention enough and did not try enough to actually improve in the subject, to actually work and learn in the class; because they did not pay me the respect I deserve as their teacher and as a fellow human being with some ability to improve their lives and the world they live in, who is working hard to do that, who shows up every day and who is as honest and vulnerable and genuine and compassionate as I can be with them, as often as I can be, and regardless of how they treat me and the work I do and the subject I love. Part of what made last year bad, I think, was that I was not able to keep being patient with my students when they disrespected me and my class: it made me lash out in frustration, or it made me shut down, which then confirmed for them that this was not a class and I was not a person they needed to listen to or be respectful of. We spiraled, because of that, both my students and myself, more than once; it took extra effort to drag us out of those spirals – and very little of that effort came from my students. If anything the majority of them encouraged that spiral, because they know that if I give up, and they give up, then they can stop trying, and they can just do nothing for as long as I have given up, as long as I stop trying and do nothing. For many of my students, for much of the time, their goal is to do absolutely nothing, to put forth no effort, to achieve no ambitions – to have no ambitions – and to not care about anything at all. Because of that they put all of the requirement for effort and motivation on me: often consciously and intentionally, again so that they can give up by making me give up.

But I did not give up, not in the long run (though I did, too often, in specific moments with specific classes), no matter how annoying some of my students were to work with, to be honest and vulnerable with, no matter how disrespectful they were in not listening, in not trying to think or empathize with me or to connect to the material. And the reasons why I didn’t give up are another part of my why, and more of what brought me back to teaching again this year.

The first one, the simpler one, is that I love English. I love literature, I love poetry and plays and novels and stories and essays and screeds and letters and songs and – all of it. I love reading and writing, and I love talking about those things, and learning about them, and teaching about them. All of it is fascinating and beautiful and magical to me, as well as incredibly important, both practically and esoterically, concretely and abstractly. It would wound me, deeply, if I were to treat my subject as something not worthy of real attention and focus and thought and energy, if I were to reduce it to excerpts and handouts and multiple choice questions and AI-generated content. It would dishonor this area of knowledge, this way of living in and interacting with the world, that has meant so much to me, that has consumed so much of my time and effort, that has brought me so much joy and also so much power. And I won’t do that, not even though my students do it every minute of every day, in every class, to one extent or another. Part of my why, part of my reason for teaching, is to fight back against that apathy and indifference and cynicism, that belief, endemic among my students and my society and growing worse every year, that reading is boring and pointless unless it is reading the captions on a TikTok or the comments on a YouTube video or a SubReddit, that writing is something best done with a prompt to ChatGPT. Preferably one entered with talk-to-text. I don’t think I can change that attitude in all of my students; certainly not in the ones who never even try to get better in my class, the ones who prefer to do nothing, at least in this context, and to be nothing as a consequence, at least in this context; but I can help change it for some of them, at least. And because I have read and taught and thought about Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 for so many years, I know that winning some people over to the side of the angels, to the side of the readers and the writers and the thinkers, the poets and the storytellers and the wordsmiths, is enough to save the soul of humanity and society – at least until we blow it up.

But then we will rebuild. If there are people who have not given up. The character Granger says it at the end of the book, after their world has, at least a little, blown up:

“There was a silly damn bird called a Phoenix back before Christ: every few hundred years he built a pyre and burned himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years, and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we’ll stop making the goddam funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation.”

That’s the other reason why I keep teaching, and again it is fairly abstract and idealistic, and again it is generally ineffective with the majority of my students: I want to make my society a better place. I want my students to understand the damn silly things we do, and that burn us up, so that they can help get us closer to that day when we stop jumping in the middle of our own goddamn funeral pyres. I want some of them to remember. To never give up.

I can’t fix all of it, of course, and so that makes it harder to keep coming back and trying again; just this year, I have had to sit through a conversation among teachers, who should all know better, about how AI is both inevitable and a valuable tool, and so we should not only accept it, but take part in it, contribute to its growth, tumor-like, on the collective mind of humanity; hearing that from my fellow teachers felt like being stabbed in the gut, and it makes me want to throw up my hands and cry out “A plague on both your houses!” I have for years chosen not to fight my students on their use of electronics, preferring to ask them to come along with me into the world of literature I make available and interesting and useful in my class; but I have watched as more and more and more of them have refused my kind invitation, my well-meaning passivity, and have failed to gain anything from me as a consequence. So now I will have to fight to make my classes available to my own students, and I don’t know how well that will work – and I don’t want to do it. I have no choice, so I will; but I don’t want to. That’s a why on both sides: I want to teach so I can fight for the souls of my students, and I want to let them do what they want, even if it destroys them.

But as I have learned from literature and from being a part of humanity and thinking about humanity, when some people are allowed to destroy themselves, they bring the rest of us down with them. I don’t want to allow that, not for a reason as stupid and worthless as laziness or fear of failure which creates failure, which are the main reasons why students don’t pay attention in class. Again, I don’t think I can save all of them – I don’t think I can save any of them, really, but I think I can help make a change in the paths for some of them, which will allow them to save themselves – but if I can save some, that will be enough. Not enough to make me happy, or to make my job easy; but enough to keep society moving mostly forward, and to allow humanity to continue to get better. If I can help them to empathize with others, as they might learn from To Kill a Mockingbird, or to think about the consequences of lies and self-serving fingerpointing, as they might start doing after reading The Crucible, or if I can just make them curious about the real value and power of reading, as they might learn from Fahrenheit 451, then I will accomplish that goal. I’ve done it before: and I hope to do it again. And again. Until I can’t do it any more.

That’s why.

Time For My Annual Tradition

Dusty Leave a comment

It’s Inservice Time again!

That means it is back to work for me.

It is Icebreaker time.

It is time to travel to Phoenix, 120 miles away and approximately 120° Fahrenheit, because my school district wants to pretend that we are all one community — even one family.

It’s time for gratitude ponchos.

This is the time of year when a professional pedagogist who makes ten, twenty times my annual salary (sometimes for each appearance) comes to my school, and tells me why everything I’ve ever even thought about doing in a classroom is wrong, and therefore, if I don’t want my students to fail utterly at everything in life, and if I want to even dream about maybe keeping my job, I will need to change every single thing that I do: because all of it is wrong.

Essentially, this is the time of year when I get mad. Frequently. Vociferously.

And my wife is now tired of listening to me rant about this issue.

So now, Dear Reader, it is your turn.

So this year, when we drove from Tucson to Phoenix to spend time with our beloved school family (Which, if that were the case, seems like icebreakers wouldn’t really be necessary? You have icebreakers at family reunions? Or Thanksgiving?), after we had the icebreaker, we listened to a motivational-speaker-sort-of-pedagogist who wanted us to think of teaching in a new way.

She said that our minds are wired to consider certain weighty moments in our lives as what she called “temporal markers” (Or was it milestones? I didn’t listen too closely.), and said we take these moments — milestone birthdays, the start of a new year, the anniversary of some important occasion — as signals to move away from the past and orient towards the future. She said we give ourselves a chance, at these times, to start over with a blank slate: and that our minds actually promote this, by taking a new perspective, examining what has gone before, and then considering new aspirations. We see ourselves as having closed a chapter, and started a new one; and this gives us new energy, it clears away old thoughts and feelings and gives us room for new ones. She talked about this like it was a very positive thing.

She asked us, as pegagogists and motivational speakers are wont to do, to share with our table partners (Oh — we were assigned tables with random teachers from the other schools, so that nobody was sitting with anyone they knew well, because Lord knows the last thing teachers need to be at an inservice is “comfortable.”) how we marked these moments of change, from past to future, in our classes, in our daily lives. And I thought about it, and I realized: I don’t really do this. I mean, okay, sure, when I had my birthday three weeks ago, I thought, “I’d like to spend today doing the things I want to do for this whole year, so I can start a trend or a habit right now and continue it all the way until my next birthday.” But I didn’t follow through with it. I don’t make New Year’s resolutions — I quit smoking on December 28th, as I recall, five months after I turned 35. I started going to the gym more regularly last May, and stopped around November, and picked it up again in February. I don’t celebrate things happening in multiples of 5 and 10; in fact, the two numbers I think I notice most (Other than 420 and 69, which I always have to notice because I am a high school teacher and I know those are going to get a response) are 42, because of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and 37, because that’s how old Dennis is.

There’s some lovely filth down here…

And in terms of my teaching, I don’t have any kind of clean breaks: when one class ends, I almost always have students who stay after the bell to talk to me for a couple of minutes, which leads directly to students in the next class coming in a couple of minutes early to talk to me. They stay into lunch, they stay after school; some of them contact me outside of school hours. I frequently give extra time for tests, letting them run into the next day’s class; I have been known, even, to continue reading a novel even after the end of the semester when we started reading it.

I don’t tend to break my time up: I tend to blend it together.

This also represents my teaching style: because I think my primary purpose, as a higher-level literature teacher, is to connect things: I want to connect my students to other people, and to the feelings of other people as well as their own. I want them to recognize that historical events and epochs are connected to the lives of people, and also connected to the present, and to our own lives. I want them to see the web of relationships that spans all of our world, and all of our history. I want them to connect art to life, and life to art, themselves to the greatest authors of all time, who were, after all, only human, and were once themselves depressed and horny teenagers.

Nobody more so than William Shakespeare.

So then, when the motivational pedagogist told us that we should create this sort of temporal mind marker with EVERY SINGLE CLASS, so that EVERY SINGLE CLASS was an opportunity for a fresh start, for a clean slate, for a new beginning with new hope and new energy, a chance to CHANGE THE WORLD, I felt — well, a little sad. Obviously I was doing this wrong. Here I am, thinking of every class as connected to every other class, and wanting to get deeper into longer learning experiences, that bleed from day into day, from week into week, from month into month. I like that I have students for multiple years — though I also think they should get a chance to have different teachers, too; I did actually teach one student for all four years of high school, so that essentially everything that young person gained from high school ELA instruction was all from me, but I think that is definitely not the ideal. But I like connecting year to year, idea to idea. I think that’s much of what is missing in our culture and society — connection — and I want to promote it.

But that’s wrong, I guess.

I should be starting every new class fresh, completely discarding what happened in the past and looking only to the future. I guess.

I also thought: My god, how much energy do you have to have to infuse that much new optimism into EVERY SINGLE CLASS?? I work hard enough trying to keep my bad moods from bleeding into the next class, and to change from one specific topic into a new one for the new class; I’m not sure I can close my eyes, ball my fists, and think, “Okay, Dusty: here we go READY TO CHANGE THE WORLD AGAIN!”

But I should be doing that, I guess. Just like I should be at the door greeting every new student who comes into my room with their own special signature handshake, so they know that they are special and individual to me. (Though, for someone to be special to you, doesn’t that mean you have to build a relationship? And remember it, from one day to the next? Would it be better to discard the past every day and treat every day as a new chance to succeed?) I guess.

Who Are You Again GIFs | Tenor
Also, who is that person you’re sitting next to?

So then, after a brief break for a brain wake-up call (We played Rock-Paper-Scissors! With our non-dominant hand! Which was way better than just sitting quietly by myself for a few minutes!), the motivational pedagogist moved on to her next topic: direction. And destination.

Where before the center of the analogy had been milestone birthdays — her husband had just turned 50, and I bet you’ll NEVER GUESS what he did for his 50th birthday! (And if you guessed this, you were right!) — this time the metaphor was flying airplanes. And she talked about compass headings, and how if you were off even one degree, out of 360 degrees on the compass, it would, over time, take you quite far away from your destination — in fact, her example was of an airplane that was two degrees off on their heading, and they CRASHED INTO A MOUNTAIN.

SO OKAY.

THAT’S COMFORTABLE.

I’M FEELING GREAT RIGHT NOW.

And how did she analogize this back to teaching and education? Well you see, if you — or rather I, since I was the target here — I focus in my planning and curriculum design too much on what I am teaching, rather than on what students are learning — that’s a bad compass heading. It may be close, it may only be off by a couple of degrees — but over time, those few degrees’ worth of difference will — well, you know.

Plane Crash GIFs | Tenor
Crashed-airplane GIFs - Get the best GIF on GIPHY
Burning Plane Crash GIF by South Park - Find & Share on GIPHY

Okay: so now, not only am I failing my students because I am not treating every single class like it’s New Year’s Eve and I only get one wish AND IT’S FOR YOU KIDS TO LEARN THIS SONNET!, but also, I am failing because, it’s true, I do often think first, “Okay, what am I doing next class/tomorrow/next week?” I do often think about what I am teaching, rather than what my students are learning.

And my failure? It’s right here:

Plane Crash Plane Crashing GIF - Plane Crash Plane Crashing Crashing Plane - Discover & Share GIFs

But here’s the thing.

I don’t buy this.

Not only do I not believe that starting fresh every single period is the best relationship to have with students, or the best perspective to have of school, or the best way to CHANGE THE WORLD; but I also don’t believe that student learning has to be the center — the course heading — for every single lesson I teach. I don’t believe, at all, that there is a single destination in education that can only be reached by adhering to a specific course heading. Partly that’s because I think of my lesson objectives in a similar way to how I think of classes ending and starting: I like to make connections. Or more precisely, I like the students to make connections. So there is never a single destination for me, it is always connected to other destinations — and since I want the students to do that part of the thinking, rather than having me prescribe exactly what connection they should make and what it should mean to them, I don’t think my lessons have only one possible (connected) destination.

For instance:

I teach this poem sometimes. Mostly as a joke, but also, because it has a useful point in it that I can make about poetry.

Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.

This is actually a poem titled “Reflections on Icebreaking,” by the comedic poet Ogden Nash, one of my favorite poets. When I teach this, most of my students connect it to Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp says it, too, in the remake), and they chortle and chuckle over the scandalous idea of their English teacher promoting drinking! Alcohol! The very idea!

We’ll leave out the facts about how steeped our society is in alcohol, and the fact that I teach high school students who have very little innocence left and certainly none about the existence of intoxicating beverages: and just look at the poem. It’s very short, obviously; Nash’s original only has four lines (Candy/Is Dandy/But liquor/Is quicker), but in those four lines, there are two rhymes, and one of them — liquor/quicker — is really quite clever.

But beyond that, between the title, which in this case provides vital information about the message of the poem, and the specific word choice that Nash gives us, there actually is an interesting point to be made by this poem. First, while my students always think the point is that liquor will get you wasted faster than candy will, I only have to challenge them once on whether or not they think of candy as a way to get wasted before they realize that probably isn’t what the poem is about. Then I focus them on the title, ask what ice breaking is (Most of them don’t really know, those sweet, sweet summer children), and get them to recognize that these are two ways to “break the ice,” to loosen up awkward social occasions. I ask them how candy can do this, and when it is used; they always think of Halloween parties and such, where candy is put out in dishes — but nobody thinks of the doctor’s office, where the child is given a lollipop to ameliorate the pain of the injection; or smokers who chew gum to alleviate their cravings for nicotine. There are countless places where candy is offered, or consumed, in order to help people relax: but Nash has, most likely, a specific social situation in mind, which we can tell because of the second ice breaker he names: liquor. Now, liquor is used to ease awkwardness and uncomfortable politeness in many situations, as well (Though hopefully not the doctor’s office); when I met my new boss this past summer, I made sure to go out with him for tacos and margaritas, even though I didn’t feel like being social, because I wanted him to get to know me better, because he’s my new boss. But there is only one social situation, traditionally, where both candy and liquor are frequently used to reduce awkwardness: it’s dating. For breaking the ice on a first date, a gift of candy is dandy — but liquor is quicker.

And that’s when I make what I think is the real point here: Nash does not say that liquor is better. He simply says it breaks the ice quicker. And it does: it lowers inhibitions, which obviously would reduce awkward tension. But because it does this fast, probably too fast, it can also lead to regret: which might be why your better choice would be candy. Which is dandy. Everybody likes candy.

So okay, that’s a lesson I teach. I think it shows the importance of specific word choice, and of important phrases like titles, and that every poem can have something genuine to say, even if it isn’t anything terribly deep.

So am I off target here?

Have I got the wrong compass heading? Will I miss my destination?

Am I headed for the mountainside?

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See, I don’t think so. I think there are, in truth, many possible destinations. If I can get a student to understand that poems have messages, that’s a victory — that’s a destination I want to reach, and which is worth reaching. If I can get a student to appreciate that poetry uses specific words to create specific meanings, that’s a destination worth reaching. If I can get a student to recognize that references in movies and TV shows can have much more depth and meaning than you would think, that’s a destination worth reaching. And if I can get a student to laugh, and enjoy either English class or poetry or both, just a little more, that’s the best destination of all.

So which course heading is that?

If I’m off by one or two degrees – will I miss my destination?

Do I need, as the pedagogical motivationist went on to say, a sharp focus on every tiny detail of the lesson, always keeping the destination in mind, because a mistake of only one degree would mean that I miss the destination and crash into the mountainside?

No. No to all of it. It’s not true, and in fact it is dangerous and damaging to what education should be.

The purpose of the metaphor, and of the pedavational motigogist in general, was to get us to focus on standards. On learning objectives. On SMART goals – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound – because that’s how you aim at a specific target, and hit it every time: when the target is tiny, and close by, and simple to recognize, to name, to teach, and to assess whether or not it was hit. And when education focuses, as education so often does, on students reaching the standards, and nothing else, then sure, the only way to teach is to focus exclusively on those tiny little learning targets. And I guess taking your eyes off the next inch you need to crawl might make it harder to reach that target in a timely manner. 

But honestly: if you are flying a plane, shouldn’t you look a little higher up, a little farther out, than the next inch? You may want to keep the compass heading locked on specifically – but don’t you also want to watch the horizon? Don’t you want to keep an eye out for, I dunno, MOUNTAINS YOU MIGHT NOT WANT TO CRASH INTO???

Wouldn’t it be a better metaphor to think of teaching and learning as flying a plane, and looking around, observing the situation around you, considering what might be a good place to land – gauging, judging, using experience to guide your assessment of the circumstances based on observations – and then bringing the plane in safely? Or flying wherever the hell you want to go, following your dreams to anywhere in the world they might lead you? Wouldn’t those be good ways to think of the school-plane we’re flying?

I think so. Though I guess it wouldn’t be proper pedamotive gogyvation.

Sebastian Maniscalco Maniscalco GIF - Sebastian Maniscalco Maniscalco Wth - Discover & Share GIFs

So here’s my new plan. I’ve thought for a long time that I would be an excellent inservice presenter. I’m good in front of a group of people, I speak well, I have a good sense of humor; and I think I know a fair amount about teaching, and could have some useful things to say to help make people improve as teachers and educators. 

But I would never get hired. Because no administration would want to buy my inservice program of “Let The Teachers Teach Whatever The Hell They Want To Because They Know Better Than You.” That system is not guaranteed to raise test scores, which is really the only reason why administrators bring in inservice presenters.

So this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to make the slickest presentation imaginable, about how I’m going to strip teachers of every shred they are clinging to of self-esteem or confidence, so that they will only do what they are told, and will never, ever, argue with their administrators ever again, no matter how inane or nonsensical are the programs and innovations those administrators come up with. And when I get hired to train a staff, I will get the administrators to leave me alone with the teachers – and then I will do nothing but praise those teachers, and honor them for the work they do and the dedication they put into it. I will thank them for everything they sacrifice to try to help their students. I will point out – because I think it’s important to remember – that students are the ones actually doing the work of learning, and that it is goddamn hard work; they deserve praise and honor as well, for every one of their victories large or small. I will help my audience of teachers see that the job of a teacher is to help students find the strength and the courage to keep working, even though the potential rewards of all of their very hard work are very far away and very abstract – and not always guaranteed, or even likely. I would encourage those teachers to talk to each other, and to their students, before they talk to any administrator, or any damn pedagogical expert, when looking for inspiration and guidance about how to create a new and better lesson for helping students get what they need. I would try to give the teachers the self-confidence to try new things, and to experiment, and to be honest with themselves and their students when they don’t know what the right answer is, or if the new thing they’re trying is the best thing: but they should try it anyway, and let students see them trying it, and thus encourage innovation and creativity and problem solving, along with honest reflection and assessment of one’s success. And I will tell those teachers to ignore every single test result, and every administrator who focuses on test results; and I will say that, if they do use standards, to remember that standards are only one small piece of a whole system of education, and they cannot ever be the most important one: because standards are not people. And education is people. Really, it is nothing but people.

And then, I will ask all of those teachers to go on Yelp or Google Reviews or whatever is the Google Pedagogy website (PedaGooglogy? We’ll workshop it.), and give me a five-star review, and lie and say that I helped them realize that they need to focus on nothing but standards in order to raise test scores, and they’ve never been so excited to do just that. 

And then I’ll use those reviews, and my slick sales pitch of a presentation, to go to another school, and do the same thing over again. 

Until I crash into the mountainside.

This Post Is Covered With Shit. But Not Full of It.

Dusty 3 Comments

There are a lot of ways to look at education.

You can see education as a means for students to practice and perfect skills: writing skills, reading skills, math skills, science skills. Incremental improvement in ability over time, largely through careful, guided practice. The steady honing of a functional tool, which will then be slotted into its proper space in the Machine.

You can see education as a place for children to explore: to learn what is out there in the world, and what connections they can make to it, and to each other, and to themselves. School is a big pot of fun ‘n’ friends; the Best Time Of Their Lives.

You can see education as the passing on of a torch, the filling of a vessel with the golden ambrosia of knowledge — or maybe the cooking of a roast. New people come to the school, and they are unburnt, or empty, or raw; and we light them, fill them, roast them, and then they are — like us. Members of a culture and an intellectual tradition, with an awareness of what that means and how they can pass the fire/water/ uh . . . heat? What does cooked meat pass? Calories? A delicious aroma? Whatever, they can pass it on to the next generation.

Or you can see education the way my students do: as the longest, most agonizing obstacle course they have ever faced, filled with everything bad — pain, fear, sorrow, impotent anger, self-loathing, failure, futility, and wedgies — going on for years and years and years, draining every drop of life from them, only to spit them out the end: where they become, most likely, new obstacles on the course for the next batch of runners.

Or you can see education the way I do, the way most teachers do: it’s a job. Better than some, worse than others. Probably not worth what we put into it.

That’s not all it is, though. And I don’t doubt that most people see education as a combination of those things, and maybe a few others — I know there are certainly those who see it as indoctrination; at my last school, in a small rural town in Oregon, I know school was seen by many as the best source for husbands and wives, for fathers and mothers of the next generation, which they saw no reason to wait to produce. There was a daycare in the school building for the children of students. Also the children of teachers and a few children from the general populace, but still: that daycare housed a whole lot of, let’s call them extracurriculars.

However we see education, though — and I don’t think we all need to agree about what it is and what it should be; I think an ongoing debate about education is probably a healthy tension — the one thing we should all agree on is this: it is important. Maybe not school, maybe not for everyone or in every way; but education is a part of how our race survives: because humans are born useless and pathetic. Giraffes and horses and moosen can stand mere minutes after being born, and run not long after that; we can’t even put on our own pants for years. Humans without education are dead. Period. So if we matter, then education matters.

And it takes the same thing to make us matter that it takes to make education matter. That thing is substance. There has to be something inside us, something behind the mask, something that makes us move, that makes us act. Something that tells me the words to say next.  Some people are driven by their emotions and passions; some people are driven by their reason; and some people are driven by the desires of something larger than themselves, even if it is larger only in their own minds. That thing could be a religion, or a nation, or a father, or just society’s approval in general; whatever it is, those people take their cue from someone outside themselves, and that is what drives them: they live to please and honor that larger thing. And I don’t mean to denigrate that type of substance, especially not when it is so clearly part of my own motivation. I want to live up to the example of those who came before. I want to please my readers. I want to win awards. And I want to experience and honor my passions, and I want to follow the course set down by my reason. All at once. All mixed up.

Nothing’s ever simple, is it?

(That’s why we need education.)

My strongest motivation is this: I want to make my wife proud. I want to make her happy. I want to take away all of her regrets, and all of her fears, and all of her frustrations; I want to give her a perfect launching pad for her own life, for her own dreams, her own motivations; I want to be the support for her substance. I mean, I want my own substance, too; but I want her to have hers, first. Because she’s better than me. And I am not at all ashamed to say that: I am proud that I am the one she chose, and I am proud that I can work to give her her chance.

And I am furious that she has to deal with bullshit instead of flying free and doing what she wants, what she is capable of. It drives me crazy that she has to claw her way out of the muck of this cesspool of a world before she can become herself. It’s like a giant, sticky, neverending cocoon made of petrified bullshit: and people like my wife, people who are and always have been butterflies, have to kill themselves getting out of it. Goddamn it.

But what this all comes down is substance. I know, I know, I haven’t defined it well. I got onto a rant-tangent — a rangent, if you will (Or tangerant?) — because I am angry about my wife’s fight against bullshit. But let me try to get back to my point. I started with education because that’s what I know best, but it could as easily be politics, or commerce, or family, and the issue would be the same: to be worthwhile, to be something that actually does for humanity what it is supposed to do, the thing must have substance.

For a family to have substance, the family members have to actually do and feel and think the way a family is supposed to, fulfilling the role that family is to fill: they have to love and support one another. There has to be genuine connections between the family members, and all involved have to honor and maintain those connections. When a family has that real bond, then it improves the lives of the members of the family; it gives them shelter in the shit-storm (A veritable shit-climate, in fact), and a way to climb up out of the muck, to break free of their cocoons. (Can I call them poop-cocoons without losing the thread here? It’s just — it’s calling to me. Poop-cocoons. I can’t help it. Sorry.) Because there is something real there, it lends real mass, real energy, real velocity, to the constituent parts; their substance has something to back it up, to drive it, and so they can have real substance.

Am I making sense here? I feel like there’s a genuinely important thing underlying this, and I fear that I’m losing it. Let me keep trying.

When politics works well, then it creates an opportunity for the citizens of the political entity — call it a country for simplicity’s sake — to be something they could not be if they lived in a place where their politics did not work well. Because this country has, through much of its history, had politics that worked well, we have been able to do extraordinary things, to be extraordinary things. Not all of us, for a lot of reasons; but we have been extraordinary. We were the first to fly, and the first to touch the moon; we cured polio; we split the atom; we created the blues, and jazz, and rock and roll, and hip-hop. George Carlin was an American. Those things came out of this nation because the nation’s political structure had substance. It was driven by serious people working for serious reasons (whether those reasons for a particular person were emotional, logical, or ethical), and taking their jobs seriously. They didn’t just live up to the appearance of their role, the mere surface; they went deep inside. And I know that because look at what happened: it worked. We created substance, which only comes from substance. Something doesn’t come from nothing.

Nothing can come from something, though. Sadly. We can come from substance, from something real, and we can turn it into a joke. And there are as many reasons for that as there are for people to live with substance, but they all have one trait in common: they are shallow. Greed, for instance, if we can turn to commerce. When someone runs a business with substance, when they recognize their role in providing goods or services to customers, and earning a fair profit in return, then great things happen: Hollywood movies and Apple computers and Ford motors. But when people seek only profit, and they recognize that creating the appearance of substance is cheaper than actually creating substance — but if the facade is good enough to fool the customers, then they can charge the same as companies that have substance — then you get reality TV, and Goldman-Sachs, and Wal-Mart. Driven only by greed, they create only hollow hills, which collapse under their own weight when we try to climb them. They don’t get us out of the shit: they bury us in more of it. A neverending shit-storm.

When education has substance, no matter what is taught, no matter how fast students learn it or how many students learn it or how much exactly they learn — they learn. When education has substance, students come out of it changed, and improved, even if indirectly. Education with substance comes, only and always, from educators with substance. They don’t have to be teachers, of course, and most of the time, probably, they are not; I’d say the most common educators with substance are parents, followed by best friends. They teach us and they make us better. They use their substance to give us substance.

I do think the majority of teachers bring substance to their work. It’s hard not to, because it’s hard to miss the importance of the job — as I said, without education, there are no people; that’s a heavy weight, which I’m glad we don’t bear alone: but we hold some of it. When we have substance, we teachers, we can hold up a fair amount of that weight. Raise it up out of the shit.

And the worst thing in the goddamn world for teachers is when we are trying to maintain our substance — using up our own personal substance to do it — and we are forced to spend our time and energy instead on surface bullshit. On forms and paperwork that cover the asses of administrators, that stroke the egos of spoiled parents, that allow shallow, empty politicians to get elected one more time by people who don’t really know what the fuck they’re doing in the voting booth.

What precipitated this rant? A lot, actually; a lot of shit. But the clearest trigger was this last weekend, this three-day weekend, a holiday in honor of Martin Luther King’s birthday (A man of substance, to be sure), which my wife and I spent a large portion of shoveling shit. Not building a structure of substance for our students, or even better, ourselves, to stand on and reach out of the shit; no no no — we were throwing shit. We were working on a syllabus for an Advanced Placement class, because we both teach AP courses at the high school where we work, me AP Literature and AP Language, she AP Art. When you teach an AP class, to be allowed to use the official AP designation, you have to turn a syllabus into the College Board, which runs the AP program (Also the SAT.).

Those syllabuses are bullshit.

The requirements for what has to be included on the syllabus are so entirely unrealistic that I doubt that a single one — not one of the thousands upon thousands of AP courses out there who have gone through this — really represents what happens in the actual class. I know mine certainly don’t reflect reality, not for either of my classes. If I taught to an empty room, I couldn’t cover all of that material, not in the kind of depth that is needed. See, the purpose of an AP class is to earn college credit while still in high school; that’s why my students take it, at least. Well, that’s the surface reason. The real reason is because these classes are challenging, and they give students a better understanding of and ability in the subject. They are classes with substance. I know both of mine are. I go into those classes with everything I have: with my experience, and my expertise, and more preparation and organization than I have ever brought to my regular classes — and I’m a good teacher in a regular class. For the AP classes, I’m better. And my students respond: I watch them grow and improve, and for the most part, I see them succeed. Some of them don’t, but that’s because they don’t bring their substance to the class; they take the class because their friends are in it, or they think I am cool (I am — but only on the surface) and they wanted to take a class, any class, with me; or they didn’t really think about how hard it would be. Or they were put in the class without any input of their own. You know: surface reasons. Bullshit reasons. Those students don’t succeed, necessarily. But the ones who come with real motivation, who do real work for real reasons? They get better. They grow. They become educated. I give them a platform to stand on — which I bust my ass building and maintaining — and they climb up out of the shit. Sometimes they even fly away.

None of that is on my syllabus. Largely because substance takes time and focus, and so you can’t cover a whole lot of ground — it’s dense. Concentrated. Has to be. But the AP syllabus has to cover, for literature, all of Western literature from 1500 to the present day: poetry and drama and prose, both short form and novels. All of it. They have to know what a sonnet is, and how William Shakespeare’s differ from ee cummings’s. They have to know both the traditional canon of dead white men, and they have to be familiar with the contributions to Western literature that have come from non-whites, and from the non-dead, and from non-men (Also called women.). They have to be able to read deeply, and analyze correctly, and write eloquently, and do all of it in 40 minutes.

And I have to spend my weekend correcting a syllabus. To make sure that it covers every one of the required learning components, that it has sufficient evidence to show that it covers every learning component, and that the evidence is in the form the AP auditors prefer. And their feedback looks like this:

Component (Which I’m making up, but isn’t far from the truth) #28: The course shows students the wide range of literary techniques from Guadalajara, Mexico, as represented by the many poets and playwrights who have hailed from that locale over the last four centuries.

Evaluation guideline: The syllabus must include the wide range of literary techniques from Guadalajara, Mexico, as represented by the many poets and playwrights who have hailed from that locale over the last four centuries.

Rating: Insufficient evidence

Rationale: The syllabus must list specific literary techniques used in specific titles of specific types (prose, poetry, and drama) by specific authors. The literary techniques, titles, and authors must be specifically connected to specific activities that show specific criteria for student mastery of the wide range of Guadalajaran literature.

Please examine our sample syllabi, or contact a Curriculum Specialist for personalized feedback, though be aware that this latter course will take weeks and weeks and run you right past the deadline for when this syllabus has to be approved for this school year.

So we got this for the syllabus we were working on, right? And we added in “The course shows students the wide range of literary techniques from Guadalajara, Mexico, as represented by the many poets and playwrights who have hailed from that locale over the last four centuries.”
It’s a lie, because I don’t consider Guadalajaran literature important enough to cover to the depth demanded by the component; instead, I teach the same wide range of literary techniques with, say, Oaxacan literature, which I spend two months on in my class. We add this lie to the syllabus — no substance there, just a surface checkmark to please someone looking only at the surface — and send it in. And get it back. Rejected again. With the exact same feedback.

So we add more evidence. We list out those literary techniques, and we list those Guadalajaran authors, and the Oaxacan ones just for good measure, and then we throw in three or four haiku-writers from Tenochtitlan, just in case. We describe the multiple essays, treatises, and book-length theses the students are going to have to write on each and every one of these elements. And then we send that pile of sloppy, gooey bullshit in.

Approved.

And that’s the end of it. The College Board doesn’t follow up on this. They don’t come and watch the class. They don’t come and ask the students what they have learned — don’t even correlate test results with specific syllabi, and ask teachers to look for areas for improvement; none of that. They don’t survey students or parents or teachers. They don’t ask us to send in work samples, or example lesson plans. All they want is the syllabus. Which they want to say very, very specific things, but which they don’t write for us; they just keep telling us we’re writing it wrong until we get it right. Which is when it’s all bullshit. Which fact they have to know: there’s no way they couldn’t. Not when every one of those thousands and thousands of syllabi are nothing but bullshit.

Here’s the kicker: once the syllabus is approved, it never has to be resubmitted. It just gets re-approved, every year, automatically. Even though my class, like pretty much every class of substance, changes substantially from year to year. Doesn’t matter.  In fact, if the course had a syllabus at the same school with a previous teacher, the College Board encourages the teacher to simply copy and “update” the old syllabus.

It’s all bullshit. I have no doubt that the intent is twofold: to prevent lawsuits from students who fail the AP exam — “I’m sorry your daughter got a -6 on the test, Mr. Svenswinderssonsen, but the syllabus on file from her school clearly states that she was taught all of the Guadalajaran literary techniques.” — and to present the AP program as being extremely rigorous. Is it actually rigorous? Not through any fault of the College Board. And not as it is purported to be on those syllabi. Which took hours and headaches to get right. So that everybody can now ignore them until the end of time.

This turned into a much larger piece than I intended it to be. But I’m feeling pretty deep in the bullshit right now, and it takes a lot of shoveling to get out. Because this isn’t just an AP issue: this is all of school. Everything I do that isn’t actually teaching is related to the same sort of thing: I give bullshit tests to show bullshit data about bullshit growth so the administrators can tell the school board and the politicians that the school has the surface appearance of actual substance. I fill out forms for students who get IEPs for exactly one reason: to avoid lawsuits. To maintain a reputation. To create an appearance of rigor and value and substance. And every hour I spend on that bullshit is one less hour I have to provide actual substance to my actual students.

We’re burying ourselves in bullshit, and ruining the one thing that we actually need, just because — we’re looking at the surface, only at the surface. Not at the substance — or lack thereof — underneath it.

Maybe in this mixed-metaphor ramble, I have uncovered something of substance for you to stand on. Maybe you can make a little more progress on getting out of your poop-cocoon. I hope so, I really do. Some of us have to become butterflies. Some of us have to take to our wings and fly. All of this shit-shoveling has to lead to something good. Something extraordinary.

I’m just afraid that the most extraordinary people are exactly the ones neck-deep and shoveling, and the ones climbing out aren’t butterflies in poop-cocoons: they’re just giant bags of shit. Standing above us, and looking down.

Happy Inauguration Day.

Teaching Hard

Dusty 2 Comments

I’m tired.

I hate the end of the school year.

But let me tell you why.

Teaching requires an inordinate amount of energy. It’s why there is such a prejudice towards younger, newer teachers, and against older, wiser teachers: we all know that both age and inevitable cynicism detract from available verve (By the way, if I ever need a stage name, I’m going to use Available Verve.), and we know (Some of us know) just how much pep is required in this profession.

It’s a lot. Because we have to fight children all day.

I’m just going to leave that image to simmer for a minute.

Aaaaaand now I’ll explain.

Elementary school teachers have to fight to first contain, and then direct, a classroom full of sugar-hyped attention-deficient kidnadoes. Think about what it takes to force a child to eat when it doesn’t want to, to sleep when it doesn’t want to, to take a bath when it doesn’t want to; now think about making them do math. Elementary teachers have to be an unbreachable wall standing against a stampede, an immovable object against 25 — or 30 — or 35 — irresistible forces.

High school teachers have the opposite problem: our classrooms are carpeted with anthropomorphic phlegm-globs, like the spittoon of a frost giant with a head cold, that would rather sleep than breathe (And who would be ecstatic if they could sleep without breathing. Or circulating blood. Except you wouldn’t recognize the ecstasy, as expressing it would, like breathing, be too tiring.), and somehow we need to motivate them to read poetry and study history and solve mathematical equations. We must be an irresistible force for a room full of immovable objects.

In either case, it’s bloody exhausting.

Add in the requirements of pleasing supervisors (who want pre- and post-observation conferences, and PLC meeting minutes, and professional development buy-in) and calming frazzled parents (The most-common phrase a teacher hears from adults is probably “I just don’t know what to do with him/her.” It has always amazed me that I, who am and will ever remain childless, can somehow give out parenting advice without getting a face full of “Excuse me? Who the hell do you think you are?” It’s not because my advice is good, though — it’s because I care enough to give it, because I take the time to try. But this, too, is exhausting, because I am handing over just a little bit more of my time and my energy.) and the endless paperwork and the endless guilt, and you might be able to imagine how tiring this profession is.

But that’s not the hard part.

The hard part is that teachers, more than any profession other than the medical fields, emergency services, and ground-level social work, get emotionally invested in the work. My clientele, if we can call them that, are people. They are children (Though in my case they have beards, breasts, and body odor [Not all three at the same time (Well, not often [See, I can’t even make this joke without feeling bad for mocking them in such a personal way. But as an English nerd, I am very pleased by this:].).].), children that are unhappy most of the time. They are confused: confused by difficult school subjects, confused by awkward romance and even more awkward bodies, confused by changing social alliances and the tidal forces of unstable families. They are bereft of childhood, and lament that lost innocence; they are terrified by a future both uncertain and looming, and avoid everything that reminds them of it. And they are angry, and sad, about all of those things.

In “Dover Beach,” Matthew Arnold described our modern world this way:

…For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

 

Arnold was describing a world without faith. That’s adolescence. That’s my students.

I sympathize with them. I remember it. I remember how my world got so very much harder when I became drenched in hormones around 8th grade (though not, sadly, drenched in sex appeal and confidence to match), and then exponentially harder again when I got to high school and, for the first time, had to work hard to succeed academically. I remember my hopes and dreams feeling shattered by reality. How everything seemed so dark, and so hopeless, and so insane. All of my writing at the time was about madness, loss, betrayal, destruction, murder. About fear and anger. That’s all I was for several years, a ball of fear and anger. With pimples. And an erection.

So when I talk to my students, I feel for them, and I want to help. Helping generally means listening to their problems, really listening and then trying to give some sort of useful response. A lot of the time — too much, really — I can’t help, and I know it; but that’s not any easier, especially when it’s because I know they wouldn’t listen to what I have to say, or that I shouldn’t say it because they should figure it out for themselves. Holding the words in is as hard as speaking them. Sometimes it’s harder. When one of my nerdy students — and as a lifelong nerd and a former awkward loner (Perhaps I flatter myself with that “former,” but my wife tells me I’m handsome and cool and funny, so shut up.), I feel the nerds’ pain more intensely — when one of them tells an awkward joke, or says the wrong thing at the wrong time, or laughs like a dork or fails to control their body odor, I want to say, “This is why girls don’t talk to you. This — and your hair.” But I can’t say it. It wouldn’t help. And it wouldn’t be right for me to do.

It’s hard to remember that. It takes effort to remind myself that I don’t have all the answers, that what worked for me won’t work for all of my students, that often they cannot hear me or believe me because of who I am. The key is to remember that they are in the same situation: no one can hear or believe them, either, because of who they are. But even when I remember that nothing I say will help, I still want to help. So I do what I can: I help them with schoolwork.

I try not to give my students busywork, because I want to show that I value their time. So my assignments tend to be lengthier, and more thoughtful. To help them both be successful and feel confident, I try to read everything they write, and give the best feedback I can; I am known for writing more on some essays than the students themselves. I respond to their thoughts more than the form of them, the grammar and syntax and vocabulary, because the ideas are the important part and also, much of the time, their strength.

But all of that takes time and energy. If I just gave them worksheets all day, I could grade everything in five minutes — or even give them to a T.A. to grade. Or my wife, who loves grading. She likes the power of the red pen. But because I give them extended questions and thought-provoking assignments, and because I want to respond to their thoughts, it means I have to grade everything myself, and I have to read everything, and I have to pay attention while I’m doing it.

And then I have to try to fix their problems. But it’s just like fixing their life problems: sometimes I can’t, and sometimes I shouldn’t; and even when I can and should, it takes time and effort. At least when they come to me with their life problems, they want an answer; but when the issue is that they don’t know when to use a semi-colon or what the point of The Odyssey is, they don’t generally want to deal with fixing that problem; they just want it to go away so they can sleep.

This is probably the worst thing: that when I try to help them, by making their assignments more meaningful and effective, they want me to give them work that is easier. They want worksheets. Because they are tired and stressed, and they don’t want to think, and if I’m trying to be helpful, why can’t I just give them easy stuff to do, or even better, no work at all? Why do I have to make them think all the time?

That’s why they turn into a sticky layer of marshmallow fluff melting over a desk. And then it’s up to me to motivate them, to scrape them up, mold them back into a vaguely humanoid shape, and crack open their brains so I can pour in the knowledge.

Except that’s not actually the way it works. I have to get them to think. Which means I have to get them to want to think.

Which is hard. And it makes me tired.

So then the end of the school year comes slouching towards us. They’re tired and sick of school, and thus that much harder to motivate. I am exhausted myself, and so now I need to do two motivatings: I have to perk myself up to perk them up. God forbid I have seniors, because then the inertia of the Senior Slump becomes quite simply insurmountable. And, though I don’t want to set myself up as being different from other teachers, I do have a couple of added difficulties that I don’t know if they share: first, I didn’t and don’t like school (though I love education), and so the glamor of the end of the school year, the proms and the yearbook signings and the graduation ceremonies, all fail to cheer me; and second, I don’t want to use grades as a means of motivating my students.

I don’t believe in it. Too much emphasis is placed on grades already for this very reason, so that they might be a more effective stick and carrot for tempting and prodding the phlegmatics. (That’s the name of my new band, by the way. The Phlegmatics. Available Verve and the Phlegmatics.) But grades are deceptive: they are an inaccurate measure. If a kid gets an A in my class, was it because of hard work? Natural ability which made effort unnecessary? Is the kid a successful cheat? Was it because my class was too easy? Because this kid had the advantage of a stable home life, with enough money for food and clothing so that this kid didn’t have to work 20-30 hours a week after school? Was it because this kid has learning disabilities and consequent accommodations?

Grades do not help students learn. Grades teach students to game the system. My students focus on large assignments rather than small ones, because small ones don’t change grades as much. But without the practice that comes from doing small assignments, and the steady incremental improvement gained thereby, they don’t do very well on the large assignments. So they ask for extra help. They ask if they can do work over again for a higher grade (Meaning I have to grade it a second time, after reading it a second time), or ask if I can look over work before they turn it in (so I can look it over again) and tell them what grade it would get (Before I grade it again, officially). They hunt, like pigs after truffles, for extra credit. And, of course, they cheat. Not because they’re lazy or stupid, most of the time, but because they don’t think they can do the assignment well enough to get the grade they want. And much of the time, they’re right — again because of the lack of steady incremental progress. That’s what grades do: they focus only on the ends, and thus destroy the means. They harm education. They replace education.

And then because we use grades as carrot and as stick, they cause stress, for students, for parents, for teachers, for schools. And that makes everything worse: my students are more miserable, and more exhausted, and so am I, both from their stress and from my own. Which is always worst at the end of the year, when the grade becomes THE GRADE.

I don’t want to add to their stress and misery. I don’t want to scare them. So I don’t hold their grades over their heads. They’re up there anyway, that sword of Damocles called THE TRANSCRIPT and THE PERMANENT RECORD, but I don’t point to it and put on my angry face. (Full disclosure: my own transcript, which was pretty ugly, hurt me exactly — none. Affected me not at all. Which is part of the reason I don’t try to use grades as a stick, because they meant zip to me personally back when I was a rage-horn-ball. But again: does that apply to all other people? Probably not.)

Unfortunately, that means I have to find some other way to motivate them. And the best one — the only one — requires of me a higher output of energy. I have to make the class, and the work, interesting. To teenagers. I have to make it useful, and also fun. I have to treat my students like the unique feeling individuals they are, and I need to show them that what matters is the thinking and the learning — not the grades.

I have to do that five times a day, every day, for ten months. And the farther we get into the year, and the closer we get to summer, the harder it gets.

I hate the end of the school year.

I’m tired.