The Life of a Teacher
Teaching
The Grind
I spend far too much time trying to avoid, or climb out of, feeling crappy about teaching. I love the job, I really do, but there are so many days (too many?) where I really want to be pursuing my personal interests. I also want to be helping the students pursue theirs, and learning new things together. I actually enjoy just about every day that I show up there but there is this persistent feeling that I am not making much of a difference to them or even for myself in my own life. That the system of teaching that I entered to change is, if anything, bolstered by my work.
My personal children go to (and went) the school system that I teach in, so, I cannot retire - yet. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Whatever job we do, and whatever we think about it, it pays the bills. After many years of teaching, I have a decent salary and good benefits. Do I give up my home and entire lifestyle? Do I leave my kids straddled with impending college debt? Or do I suck it up and teach until they leave college? My youngest child will graduate this year from the system that I teach in, but then I have two kids in college with the corresponding college bills. Well, that's only a few more years. By then, I will only have five years or so left to retire and collect a lifelong pension. You see? And so it goes. I mean, on a day to day basis, I enjoy myself so what am I complaining about? I just can’t shake the feeling that I'm wearing a pair of golden handcuffs.
Becoming a Teacher
Well, I always hated school. It's that simple. I did, and still do, love learning and exploring and creating... so, it is a pretty rough statement about schools for me to say that I hate them. I thought that the things we learned often felt arbitrary, the tests and grading systems felt punitive, and the physical state of sitting in a chair and listening to people or participating in their predetermined activities practically ate up my very soul. And now I do that to other people's kids, to kids just like me.
I performed average to poor in school but always did very well on intelligence tests, standardized tests and such... but boredom and getting into trouble in school started to chip away at my ability to do well on state tests by the end of HS.
When I was in college, the freedom to choose classes got me interested in philosophy and science and I enjoyed school a bit more. These classes paved the way to a minor in education and taught me about education's role in breaking cycles of injustice and inequality - and that is important to me. I came to believe, and still do, that education could solve all of the world's problems because few situations are made better by ignorance. It just has to be done right... So, I became a teacher to change the world!
The Honeymoon(s)
Once I got my first teaching job in Brooklyn, I was excited and very young. That made me a very popular teacher. I was also probably popular because I was a terrible teacher. Kids got away with more in my classroom because I was a weak disciplinarian. I was only a few years older than them and wanted to give them more chances to succeed. I was actually quite strict in certain ways but they liked that I didn't nitpick on details that many veteran teachers focused on, such as putting their names on the top right hand corner of each assignment, or busting them for coming in a minute or two late, or taking points away for handing in an assignment late. I didn't focus on those things because I preferred to focus on whether they 'got it' or not. I also wanted to be a guide to them and tell them about the "real world"... even though that wasn't my curriculum. I was easily led astray into stories about my life and trying to offer life lessons in response to their personal problems. Even today, kids love to take advantage of my propensity to be easily distracted and side-tracked from the lesson to talk about life... and, honestly, I could do it all day. I even received a gift from a student last year that was a collection of what he called “Life Lessons” that I had found a way to work into my actual lessons.
As I started to build a family, I changed schools a few times. Once, to leave the city and get a suburban yard for my future children. Another for a pay raise to support my growing family. Yet another time, I wanted to reduce my commute so that my wife could keep the one car we had during the day. The last time was to enroll my kids in a great school district without having to move there and pay the taxes. I'm still in that district. This is not to mention the moves I've made within districts for a change in grade level or for the needs of the school. In the course of the first twenty years of teaching or so, I've switched jobs, roles, or buildings six times. Most of those changes afforded me "young new teacher" status and a corresponding honeymoon period with colleagues and students. More recently, I'm not the new, young teacher. And I am likely not making any significant moves in the next and final 10 years of my career.
Now, I bring some weariness to teaching. I've codified the curriculum to make planning easier. I mark student papers late because it is more difficult to grade things out of sequence when I haven't looked at that material in over a week. I've become way more effective at delivering the curriculum and holding kids accountable but much less of the teacher I wanted to be.
Real School
One day, early in my career, I asked one of my more earnest female students why she didn't ever have her homework. She was an adorable little overweight Mexican girl with beautiful eyes and a motherly smile that told me she knew a great deal more about life than her age might reveal. She told me that her parents worked late into the night and that she had little brothers and sisters that needed to be cared for. I was a stoic young man but being older now, the story always makes me feel like I could cry.
I had been punishing her for being one of the best kids any parents could ask for! I was taking points from her when she was doing way more than many of my other students. But even worse... I was lowering this kids grade while she was learning very important life skills! I reconnected with the young me that had hated the way I was treated as a student and I immediately began plotting the takeover of public education. I found a partner who also felt alienated by his educational experiences and we started designing a charter school (you can see the CFA constitution here) that I was sure would change the way education worked worldwide... forever.
The charter school application imagined a school where students were not grouped by age (no 8th grade, 9th grade, etc.) but rather grouped by interest and skill level. My co-designer and I imagined a school without grades as well. Not a pie in the sky, ‘kids do whatever they want’ strategy. More like a military school where you show up for AM exercises, you meditate at lunch and you can study and train in whatever you want ------ but you have to justify it with state standards. We imagined kids earning physical education "credits" at the skate park and others debating US/Cuba relations for history credits. Some might build a radio station and design some of the equipment for math and science credits while others would broadcast news from the school or the local neighborhood for English and history credits. Most incredibly, we imagined students like my young Mexican surrogate mom could earn credits for the things they were doing in their actual life. They would report on it and analyze their own experiences with a teacher guide - and earn credit for the lives they wanted to live or the lives they had to live.
It would be amazing! Students would help us run the school. Forget stupid puppet Student Governments designed to appease kids by letting them air their grievances or offer pizza friday options in the lunchroom, our school would actually let kids help us run the school office, help make orders for school supplies, clean the school, design and execute course proposals, write the school rules, and get credit toward state standards for doing it.
We would track the achievement of state standards with a heat map and collect a portfolio of evidence for each item that they had worked with. Audio files of their radio broadcasts, video files of their community organizing efforts, journal entries, and so on. The grid square for a particular standard would change color as they were exposed more and more to that fact, idea, or skill. Teachers wouldn't tell them what to learn but would act as partners helping students identify their passions and achieve their personal goals - all while helping align those experiences to the requirements of the state education department. I understand it is still imperfect because there may be goals that do not align with State Standards. I would argue that the Standards are often open-ended enough to accommodate a great deal of diversity and, believe it or not, there is no requirement stated in the Standards that says how many you have to actually master. So, if you miss 35% of those Standards, don’t you still have a passing 65%?
Over the years, I've partnered in the creation of two educational tech startups that I thought might bring this dream to life by helping to create the tool that would allow teachers to handle all of the data and generate the heat map. Really, I was seduced by the opportunity to build this while keeping a salary and jumping into the tech world. CEO's loved the vision up front but ultimately this particular aspect never made it past the drawing board and both CEO’s put their own ideas to the fore even though they had never taught a single day in their lives. I became a hired educational consultant. And when I say hired, I mean paid in stock options that are, quite literally, valueless at this point.
And now I've started this blog. To get this idea (and other ideas) out there. Monday, I will go back to work and grade 75 papers that all say basically the same thing but with slightly different words so that they don't get in trouble for copying.
The Same Ol' Teacher?
I've lived for a while with the pipe dream that I could make a mini version of the school in my classroom. But students all arrive to my class the same age and in the same grade. They all arrive in a class full of content that they did not choose. They are aware that I will give them a grade based on how well they complete and understand the work I put forth. I can only stray so far from the school's curriculum. The people in my department, and my department chair, don't want me to stray too much from the other teachers. Hell, we even had to have a meeting when another science teacher and myself offered "menu options" on the climatology unit! It was too radical to give students choices! Parents called in to see why their child is unsure of what's on the next test. They wanted to know if it was possible for me to ‘just give notes.’ We are told we have autonomy but it is autonomy in a very limited space. In addition, they didn't choose to be part of my own personal experiment in education - so, would doing this be fair to them. I’ve concluded that it would not be fair.
Every day, with the kids, I have fun. We joke around, we discuss interesting topics, we help each other, and we get work done together. But I've watched so many years go by with me perfecting the art of being the teacher I didn't want to be. You have to if you want to pay the bills. That's how you don't get fired from a teaching job. The students and the parents that I serve want a good experience and a decent grade. That's all. How can I blame them for that? My job is to deliver the curriculum the school has sanctioned. My job is to deliver the curriculum in a way that is clear and comfortable to the kids. That means, to deliver it in a way they are used to having it delivered.
I'm still generally perceived as a 'fun' teacher because I'm still very flexible and forgiving and the kids often comment that my class is one of the only ones they never cut... (yay!) I'm still easily distracted and tell my life stories and listen to theirs and try to offer good advice even though I've tightened up on late papers and such. I'm still pretty much a pushover when it comes to rules and grades. But how could I not become dejected once in a while? Now I'm that teacher... the teacher that defends a poorly worded test question because conceding an error might mean there are five more kids with their own version of something they thought was unfair... it is all ridiculous.
Dream 2.0 Deferred
This is not the end of the road. In fact, this blog post may represent the beginning of the career I have after my little girl graduates college. Or maybe it will just put the idea in some young person's mind and they can pick up where I left off. Who knows? The idea that students should be allowed to explore their own interests, follow their passions, earn credit for their life work - these are good ideas that need to be brought to life in schools. I will not give up on sharing that thought and trying to make it real for some kids.
But I have learned that there is value in what we do in a traditional classroom too. I'm working on trying to see myself more as a trainer. Few people want to do the exercise, but it is necessary. Similarly, students may never care about geography or geology again, but the exercise of training their minds to remember something, grappling with their minds to make sense of a concept, and/or honing a skill until it meets a standard... well... that's priceless....
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