Three years. I have been in this profession for three tiny years, three years of immeasurable growth and unfathomable darkness and self-pity and ice cream at inhuman times. And I'm already sick of the game.
I don't know how you do this for twenty, thirty, forty years. I really don't.
Reading Emily Moore's article, "Why Teachers Are Not 'Those Who Can't,'" I was reminded both of the reasons I became a teacher and the reasons that, sometimes, I feel as ridiculous and weak as an ice cube dropped in an erupting volcano. She mentions the amount of disdain she experienced as a Princeton graduate who decided to become, God save her, a teacher.
I know what you're thinking: what is Princeton doing offering teaching degrees? Are they joking? How could they sink so low?
And, based on her article, that is how people outside of teaching (who, for the most part, are people who believe they have zero stake in the public education system in this country) view educators. We are a bunch of has-beens at best; a cadre of fools who tell ourselves we are touching lives while simultaneously ticking off the minutes until our next vacation.
Oh, also, we are all encased in the adamantium shield of teaching unions, an association with which is on par with marrying into the Corleone family in the eyes of the public.
All joking aside, Mrs. Moore's experience is a reflection of how many in this country view the education profession: as the ultimate sieve. All those who fail at the "real" jobs will eventually wash down to the great crap trap that is teaching. One step above the sewer.
As I read Anthony Mullen's account of his experience with the windbaggery of politics in "Teachers Should be Seen and not Heard," I noticed this lack of respect extending into the political sector. He expertly points out the biggest problem facing teachers: the people who make decisions about how we should be doing our jobs have never done our job. That, or they are so far removed from the actual practice of teaching so as to render their opinion antiquated and almost entirely theoretical.
I don't have the guts to walk up to an auto mechanic and slap the wrench out of his hand, then proceed to tell him how he should be doing his job, according to a teacher, a street musician, a cop, and an exotic dancer. None of us know the ins and outs of his work; why in blue hell would we ever be allowed a say in the standards by which he is measured? Yet such is the nature of the teaching profession.
To teachers' infinite credit, though, we all soldier on.
Our profession is questioned, ridiculed, and changed without our say. We continue to teach.
Parents we have never met rage at us for the failings of their offspring, the children they have been raising and taking care of for the sixteen hours a day, forty-eight hours a weekend, and three months every summer that they aren't in school. We continue to teach.
Because there are days like the one I had today, where students come in to my room for parent-teacher conferences and are excited to share their writing with their parents. Where I find out that I am the only person who has been allowed to read the novel-in-progress of a shy, erudite, uniquely gifted student of mine. Not even her parents have seen it. Where I can choke up a little bit when a student mentions that he wants his parents to come to my classroom first, because he has an "A" in my class, and because he knows that "I'm probably the only teacher who will have something good to say" about him.
So yeah, pass your laws and make your judgments. Three small years, and my heart has broken and mended and expanded beyond all logical boundaries thanks to the only people who really matter in this situation: the students.
I guess I understand, now, how I'll do this for the next twenty, thirty, forty years.
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