Published December 12 in The Examiner
Frank McCourt’s memoir on his teaching career is an example of how ambivalent most of us feel.
Early in his bestselling book, “Teacher Man,” he argues with himself: “I am teaching. Storytelling is teaching. Storytelling is a waste of time. I can’t help it. I’m not good at lecturing. You’re a fraud. You’re cheating the children.”
I have a similar dialogue with myself nearly every day. This past week it ran: “I hate this job. Will I ever be able to wake up after 5 a.m.? Yeah---in retirement. But Lucy just won first place in a writing contest with an essay that helped make her a stronger person. If I didn’t force students to write, their lives might be different. I love this job.”
I go through the same litany when faced with annoying meetings, requirements to write descriptions of courses and lessons, student complaints about my Shakespeare and James Joyce assignments, and guilt at my failure to help new teachers. Ambivalence is a constant companion. Teachers just have to get used to it.
We’re paid too little money. Yet we get snow days off, and a week around Christmas and Easter, and two months in the summer. We work too hard, but can come home in the afternoon. We bring our jobs home with us in the form of papers to correct and recommendations to write; yet sometimes that job reveals, hidden at the bottom of the stack, transcendent student work that keeps us awake, it’s so revelatory.
We whine in teacher workrooms---trading stories of student excuses (“the dog ate my homework” has been replaced by ”printer failure.”) Yet we also can’t wait to share with others a lesson that worked well, or news of our students’ admissions to the colleges of their choice.
We are our own worst enemies. There are teachers at my school who hate my writing. There are those who love it. (An anonymous note in my mailbox last year about the “complaining and rambling on” in my column predicted I would be paying others to publish in the future.)
We want parents to support the school and our programs, but do little to truly show what those programs are. Each year Eliot Waxman and I invite parents for food and a seminar, to recreate a bit of our classroom. Yet few teachers extend such invitations, and both Eliot and I would be first to admit that the invitations, food, and planning consume most of our energy for that week.
So what is the answer? Support one another? Stop complaining and bragging? Pretend our love for the profession is “unmixed with baser matter,” as Hamlet phrased it?
Or admit that teaching is the most frustratingly wonderful, exhaustive adrenaline rush there is? That it is a profession with few “right ways” and few answers? That it defies all those tomes students read in education classes, preparing them for the “real” world of the classroom?
I think all new teachers should read “Teacher Man” instead, and recognize that they, too, will be as ambivalent about their calling as Frank McCourt and I.
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