Teaching Today

After two snow days this week, which followed two last week, I am reminded why I still teach, even though I truly do not enjoy it any longer: vacation days and snow days. No other job provides the simultaneous excitement when both the kids and mom have a day off in the middle of the week due to this beautiful crystallized water falling from the sky.

This realization that I have to go back tomorrow and endure another day of teaching, that I need to grade those papers that I didn't touch while at home or lesson plans I didn't work on but read and wrote and played game apps and watched movies instead, makes me seriously consider a sick day. Why not? I've got something like 29 saved up.

The problem isn't the papers or the lesson plans, or even the kids. It's the fact that I want to inspire but I'm told to stick to the standards, to teach only the prescribed curriculum. If I teach exactly what the kids will be tested, I'll be a good little teacher whose evaluations will reflect a genuine aptitude for teaching.



The author of _The Little Prince_, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, once wisely stated, "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." And yet...

Teachers are told to show the kids how to collect the wood, to assign them tasks that prove they know how to hammer correctly, how to sand adequately, and how to wax well enough to pass the waxing test. We get kids who know how to complete tasks, but we don't have kids who feel inspired to want to do them. Has anyone ever thought, "Hmm, maybe what we are teaching them isn't inspiring. Maybe what we are teaching is, in fact, effing boring"? I have. Every day for the last 13 years. Ever since my own kids started school, too. Even more so since then.

I love teaching novels. Not because I love the stories (although I do), but because we can talk about big ideas. The curriculum tells me I should be teaching the students about literary devices and elements of fiction, which is all good and fine and whatever IF I want a bunch of drones who know what a theme is and can pick it out of a lineup. However, they aren't inspired by that! Talk to them about why people believe what they believe, why we think the way we think, and why a character is so damn annoying (yes, Holden Caulfield, I'm talking to you!), and you get kids who are inspired to want to know more. Do they have to read every word of the novel to get that? No. Do they want to? More do than don't.

I use a circus analogy all the time with my kids (the school ones and the home ones), and I believed it had served me well over the years. We (the ring leaders) ask the kids to jump through various hoops throughout their educational careers. We start with really big hoops like writing one's name or adding two single-digit numbers. As the years go on, the hoops get more difficult to get through, but there is still that "reward" of passing another level (grade) so they can move on to a series of even more difficult hoops. Many get bored, just like a large cat would. The whip has to be cracked, and they have to feel a tiny bit threatened in order to get back in line with the others. That's why we have grades and GPAs. They don't want to get to the end and it all be for naught, do they?

When my students get bored, I remind them about the hoops in life and in school. We have to get through this one so we are closer to the prize. I've been such a sage to give such grand advice... Except now I am going to call BS on myself.

Who wants to jump through a bunch of hoops only to face more hoops? That sounds awful! No wonder student apathy is so great in schools like mine. What's the point in getting an education today only to face the idea of poverty if one doesn't go get more education? And don't stop there, because the other guy has an advanced degree. Better get that, too. For what? A low-level management job in a corporation that could lay you off the next day because they care more about the bottom line than the livelihood of their employees, and there is a dozen more like you waiting to get their feet in the door?

But I digress...

I can't inspire kids any longer with aspirations of more education to get a good job. Our country doesn't value hard work anymore. It values the almighty dollar. University administrators do not care about the students but about their parents' wallets. And school boards don't care about the students' well being or their love of learning; they care about how much money they can get from the state (who wants to kill public schools, mind you) and how to reduce the budget as much as possible by reducing the number of teachers, all the while tying those teachers' salaries to test scores of the students who don't care because they aren't inspired.

Aw, man. This is bleak. I think I need a vacation.

So what is the solution? Like a damn drone, I'll continue to jump through my own hoops to reach that golden prize: retirement. And, hopefully, if I'm still young and healthy enough to enjoy it, I'll get the chance to be inspired myself.