20-15-10

Photo by Carli Jeen on Unsplash

I filed grades for my last class of the year this past Friday and it occurred to me that this is a season of professional round numbers for me. 

The end of that summer course marks the completion of my 10th year as a full-time professor of writing, my 15th teaching in higher education, and my 20th as an educator. 

Not bad for a job I initially avoided and then took on as a two-year stop-gap to “see what I actually wanted to do” after I left daily journalism. 

Before you get the wrong impression, this is more a commentary on how my not seeing the significance of this year was the result of a very different realization. I’ll save the sloppy nostalgic tour of my career for 30-25-20.

I really didn’t consider the numeric synergy of this year until just before it ended. Can’t imagine what I was so preoccupied with...

What I think I have felt most in the past few months is the strain of standing in the middle of two forces the pandemic has laid bare in education. That fault line runs directly under the intersection of what I appreciate most and least about my job.

The reason I love teaching—like all good teachers I know—is the students. It’s a cliched answer because is so consistently true. 

Over the years, I have worked with now thousands (in the plural) of students from elementary kids to doctoral candidates. And I don’t teach large seminars at the college level, so when I say I’ve worked with them, I really have. I have mentored writers, coached basketball players and runners, spent weekends and summers helping some students remediate their grades and others get their books ready for publication. 

The headaches in all of this are numerous, but the sense of purpose I gain from helping people engage their work and their lives in ways that push them toward expecting more of themselves is why I do this. 

I guess my motivations are pretty basic: tending their growth is what makes me happy. It’s also a site of much learning on my part.

At the same time, the charge toward re-opening schools in the fall despite many strong reasons to resist such plans highlights the thing I can’t find a way to reconcile about my profession. 

We’ve made schools a business and it’s wrecked them. And in the process, teachers from Kindergarten to graduate studies have been saddled with duties and expectations that take us from the things we should be focused on: teaching students and partnering with them in the ways they most need.

I know of no other profession that caters more to the desires of people who come from outside of it with no expertise in what makes it work best. Everybody went to school, which apparently makes them an expert, or so the tone of their advice would seem to indicate. 

And I get it: there are many stories of schools from tiny districts to large universities failing at their charter. But where that should mean correcting via best practices and the research that exists on the subject, American schools have done what all American institutions do: they’ve applied the thinking of corporate efficiency and capitalistic incentives through resource scarcity to look for ways to “improve” education. 

Only to achieve the opposite effect. 

We defund higher education. We saddle students with crushing debt. We make teachers perform administrative duties while increasing administrative bloat at every turn. We increase class sizes and demand more work from teachers already overloaded. We pay less and expect more. 

We test students into the ground, measuring abstract notions of “development” and “performance” that tell us little more than how well the system was designed to embrace or erase where those students come from. 

We spend on campus police and stadiums while cutting back on counselors and support staff. We say we offer a free education in our country without really counting the costs associated with it. 

We fund schools by their zip code, thus ensuring those in the wealthiest neighborhoods remain one more source of privilege for the minority of students who can attend them. 

And in all of this, we prefer only the stories of the exceptional educators. The ones who teach math in the inner city and suffer a heart attack from the stress. The ones who help students find their own voice in writing, showing their dedication by going bankrupt in the process. The ones who seem heroic by simply learning that it takes more than good intentions to be a good teacher and it was never their job to save these kids in the first place. 

We love these teachers because they feed the narrative of exceptionalism. They are also myths. 

The reason I love teaching doesn’t come with a casting announcement for who will play me in the movie version of my time in the classroom (though we all know it will be Liev Schreiber). It doesn’t carry cash incentives like selling steak knives. And in most cases, it does not come with the overt recognition of the people around me.

It’s the small moments when students allow us in enough to learn that they are not destined to fail. That they are not invisible. That they are, in fact, capable of more than people have given them credit for, themselves included. 

Good teachers make a life’s study of how they can become more human and approachable rather than how they can be more “rigorous” (generally a euphemism for how they can make their preferred style of learning the definition of difficulty in the classroom). 

They train for seeing the smallest signs of growth or openness and they press into them rather than seeking to flatten out all the students into one homogeneous set drones who can perform equally under the same expectations. 

They don’t work at being popular so much as trustworthy and fair. And they don’t care as much about grades as they do about gradual improvement, even when the system pushes them—hard—to do just the opposite. 

And that’s what hit me about my workiversary. I didn’t see it coming because I’m perpetually too busy with that course of study. I’m not perfect. Hell, I’m not even exceptional. 

I’m merely reaching for effective. That’s enough, contrary to what the “experts” in everything other than education contend.