I’ve been moving ever so incrementally (as I always do) in my thinking towards starting to write about my teaching experience. While it’s difficult, maybe impossible, to write about a situation while you’re in the midst of it, because of certain experiences, changes, and radical personal thoughts, I’m compelled to attempt to get to the bottom of the well of my thoughts on this subject. What follows is an exercise towards that end. Maybe I’ll continue to do this, or maybe I’ll remain silent here and one day whop the world over the head with my devastating exposé on the gross civil rights violations that public schools perpetuate every day. We’ll see.
Because the issues connected to my job are so vast and intertwined, it’s hard to find a place to start. While the beginning of something is always a fine place, I’d argue that situations with any true beginning are as rare as a politician with a spine. Chronological time is too often a comforting myth, a way for us to make sense of the senseless. Before I digress too much, what I’m going to do here is dissect a failure. Because I came to work today happy and excited. I’m alive; I have a beautiful girlfriend and a healthy relationship with her; I have a son whose arrival I look forward to with the energy and hope of a million children fidgeting in their beds on Christmas Eve; I have a job that gives me a fairly decent standard of living and which on rare times allows me to interact with literature and witness the intellectual growth of children. I don’t have it bad, but I must state unequivocally – I hate my job. I hate nearly everything about it, and that acidic hatred has seeped and burned its way into other areas of my life. I’m sick of the rare glimpses of normalcy, and though I’m burrowing beneath the layers that present themselves as fact on a daily basis, I don’t really expect to find answers. Well, actually I do, but I’m not looking for specific answers. I have no preconceived answers or desire to find anything particular. I’m an honest scientist who’s going to cut into a fascinating beast. Perhaps I’ll learn something fantastic and beautiful. Perhaps I’ll merely cut the thing open, see what’s there, and move on. But the cutting and observing and the analyzing, those things are necessary even if they get me nowhere tangible.
My work days start off in ways that aren’t normal and are probably detrimental to my health. I know, unless you’re a member of an alien race, that most people hate getting up in the morning. But that loathing and fury that clouds the mind and causes a normally peace-living person to contemplate terrible crimes against humanity usually burns off with a hot shower, coffee, or cigarette. Mine persists and grows and morphs into a persistent and seemingly eternal bad mood, not an everyday bad mood that comes and goes and is rarely remembered because it’s one of those parts of life lacking the power to become something substantial. Maybe it’s not even a mood because the cause of feelings of general gloom and worry and fear stem from the insurmountable problems I face. Before I get further into this, I’d like to address the obvious, something that is obvious now after fighting and toiling under this burden. I’ve learned some things at a cost, and because I’m in a cement-drying stasis, the cost presents itself as my reality. It’s not, and learning to live like it isn’t has been one of the hardest struggles of my life. So the obvious is that I should just brush this off, that I’m stuck in this job because of the economy and a couple other factors I have no power to influence. I’m ranting and shaking my fist at the fact that grass grows and I have to mow it. I’m hardening my heart to protect it because I’m getting upset at things I or no one can change. So why bother? I can’t answer that to my satisfaction. All I have now is the knowledge that I love to dig deep into an issue, to analyze it from every angle, to let my mind go at a problem with a tenacity and ferocity that is perhaps better directed elsewhere. I don’t know any other way to operate. And the simple principle is true: when you care, it hurts. How I care has morphed over time, but I still care.
So my three morning alarms went off at their intervals, and I did something I’ve only done a handful of times this year (and the same ratio applies to my whole career, to he honest, but what before was mere laziness or a desperate grasp at just a few more minutes to recover from my weekend behavior on the weeknight before): I got up with my last alarm, what should be the latest I should get up, the time that would give me the luxury that many others may have to wake up and not engage in a mad dash to shower to car to work, an unnecessary hardship created and perpetuated by me alone.
I awoke with the same old feelings of dread of another day not teaching and not being myself in the classroom and not being able to do what I was trained to do, of readying myself to say the same thing every day – Sit down; be quiet, etc. – a burning desire to be anywhere else than where I am now in my life. Lately I’ve tried something simple, something that feels fake and Hallmark-ish, but that through the wear of unfulfilled expectations, talents, and hopes I’ve come to embrace as the only preventative to insanity: looking at the positive, of ignoring the terrible despite its ubiquity, of simply thanking God that I’m alive, that I have a job, that every so often the job can be what it can and should be – a sublime interaction of teacher and student, the value of growing youth via the equally sublime interaction of human and literature, really a fundamental connection of human minds and experience transmitted through the crafted skill and ordered arrangements of 26 symbols. And it worked. I got out of the shower, dressed, and felt a rare thing: peace. I was prepared for the day, prepared to fight and work and cajole and push and attempt to motivate despite the massive obstacles and the long history of failure, perhaps mine but in my current view, of that which resides outside myself and even the walls of the school building. Then I got to work.
I love to write. I hate teaching writing. Teaching writing at my school is like teaching empty desks. Teaching writing to those who don’t have basic writing or thinking skills, nor much prerequisite knowledge to form original thoughts and opinions is one of the most difficult things to do. It’s not impossible. Even a dummy can begin to learn to write (to the extent they’re able to access some kind of prior knowledge or experience) if one thing is true: they are intrinsically motivated. In other words, they have something they need or want to say. This motivation can not be manufactured, imparted, mandated, or contrived in any way. But that’s exactly what I had to do at work this morning. The assignment was to write a persuasive paragraph with two facts and two opinions. They understood the fact and opinion part well enough. But the writing. In order to get a literate paragraph out of my students, I need to tell them what to write in every sentence. I have to list in order what each sentence should contain. “I don’t know what to write” is a statement I hear multiple times in a period despite my step by step instructions, heavy-handed modeling of what a paragraph should look like, and multiple repetitions of the instructions. It’s a Siren call that skips over the path to lovely ladies and instead gives me the impetus to murder. I can tell you what each sentence in a paragraph should contain, but I can’t tell you what to write. I can’t tell you what you should say in order to back up the assertion you’re arguing. Well I could, but then you’d never learn to do it for yourself. You’d never learn to have your own thoughts. You’d never learn to think for yourself and express it in a way that allows you to converse with others. You’d never be able to get you out into the wider world. You’d be a stunted, undeveloped human, a pod that exists for its own self, never perpetuating the thoughts and ideas that could and would contribute to the world. We always worry about making the world a better place and we admonish each other with the tired quote “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” and yet the answer to a better world, i.e. a world that allows for more people to better their own well-being and prosperity, is in learning to write, learning to think, and sharing those thoughts. Part of learning to write is practicing it. Just doing it. I give ample time to practice writing in my class (though I’d like to add even more). But writing isn’t the most popular thing in my class, part of the perpetuating cycle that leaves clear writing-thinking as an unattainable goal for my students. There comes that intrinsic motivation thing again.
So wham! As my 1st period gets under way, I’m confronted with defeat, defeat as insurmountable obstacle. Instead of scaling Everest, I’m forced to stand at its base and chip away at it. And maybe out of that futile action, someone can benefit. In some absurd way, in some corner of the surreal, some can be benefit where it seems no one can or should. But that’s not good enough for me. I loathe the veteran teacher axiom that as long as you reach one child you’ve done a good job. That falsity comes from defeat. And it perpetuates defeat. Maybe that’s something you tell yourself as you lay your head at night, a diversion and deception of the mind that allows you to not hang yourself. But it’s not for me. Maybe that’s my problem.
So what is that failure? It’s failure to reach an objective. At this point, I’m not identifying it as my failure, or even anyone or anything else’s. It’s simply losing, falling behind, not reaching a goal, not doing what you set out to do. Over and over, daily. The following are the elements of the failure, the obstacles to reaching the objective.
I’ve alluded to the greatest obstacle (by the way, that’s pronounced “ob-stack-le” a la Pete Hogwallop) of the lack of intrinsic motivation and adequate prior knowledge. What’s required to hurdle this obstackle is one-on-one attention. Because of my students’ inability and unwillingness to be quiet on their own (in any given class, on any given day, roughly 25% of the class is off-task, i.e. producing distracting noise. Too often that 25% influences another 25% and you can imagine what half a classroom of ill-mannered 7th graders sounds like when you’re trying to teach), one-on-one attention occurs only because I am able to control, with great struggle and loss of patience, peace of mind, and general sunny disposition, my focus and emotions. I’m able to circle the room and read 20 paragraphs in 45 minutes despite it seeming as if I’m holding my class in the middle of a riot. Here’s another example of the students being the burden rather than pulling the burden of learning themselves. And when it comes down to it, when we look at what students have retained and are able to do a short time in the future and whether they have the abilities to succeed on their own in later grades and after school, students in my school and others like it never learn to learn for themselves. Because they can’t do something as simple as be quiet and listen, they lose out on valuable instruction and skills they’ll need later in life, from the next day for the next lesson in sequence to whatever it is they do post-education.
So coupled with the noise and the constant need to redirect and admonish and punish (though that’s something I’ve given up on because there is no support from the school at large and to discipline correctly so that the desired outcome is attained is something one teacher, or even a group of teachers, can’t manage without huge sacrifices in time and energy needed for other job-related tasks.) is the need to make sure every student is doing every step of the writing process correctly. Because if an idea in the prewrite stage is off the cogency of the essay will be off, it’s essential for a developing writer to be walked through these early stages in the process. The majority of my students have demonstrated that they can’t follow a set of instructions to the T in order to develop an essay (or much of anything else). So I have to hold their hand. No problem with that, really, but it becomes a problem when I’m exhausted after my first class. I’m no stranger to exhaustion and I want to come to work to work hard and feel like it was worth getting out of bed in the morning. But this is a whole new level, a Sisyphean task of maintaining order in a classroom of students who are untrained in how to conduct themselves in a classroom, while reading and thinking about the responses of 20 students, in essence dividing my self into multiple people to perform the multitude of tasks. Nearly ten years of this have worn a groove in me, a groove that disturbs me to a point that I’ve come to constantly question myself, constantly ask myself how I can improve, taking the impetus for 60 kids a year for ten years, bearing that burden as if it was mine because I was taught to always do my best and to never ever give up.
What I’m getting to in all this is that I can’t bear that burden anymore. I’ve been stretched too thin. Coming to this realization has cut my heart with the sharpest of knives. It has eviscerated me, emasculated me, thrown me into the devil’s den of self-doubt and defeat. And it’s created an anger that has no outlet, no direction, no target. And when anger has no outlet, it feeds on itself, and instead of being consumed, it grows more fierce, more corporeal, more permanent, more powerful, more ubiquitous. The fact that it even exists, that it has found a home in my heart, continues the cycle of anger upon anger and self-recrimination.
I know all those feelings are not real, that they’re not reflective of who I am or what I do every day. I’ve made progress in not listening to that demon voice that whispers so seductively, “You’re not good enough,” “You’ve failed.” That voice that isn’t a voice at all because with a voice you can at least tell it to shut up; with a voice, at least it’s connected to a body and a mind, someone else’s, corporeal things that can be attacked and made to be silent. But regardless of my progress, and regardless of my hope and knowledge that I will feel better soon, the burden of teaching children when their parents haven’t is so immense that the added burden of inept administrators, well-meaning but inadequately trained colleagues, and a system broken because despite our stated goals and lofty speeches about doing it all for the kids not enough of us step up and share the burden but through our selfishness allow it to fall heavily on anyone that gives even one shit about all of this is simply crippling. I earned a bachelors and masters degree, and read and write daily, as part of a lifelong commitment to this “subject,” among many other pieces of evidence of that commitment, in order to teach the subject. In my current job, doing what I’ve been trained and work(ed) so hard for isn’t possible. And it can be.
Bellicose Blatherings 
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