American Teacher: Rethinking Education Part 4
Some countries have social safety nets. In America, we have teachers.
When you are a public school teacher in America, you spend a lot of your evenings at school. You stay late for various meetings and to make phone calls to parents. You fill out incident reports about behavior problems and you strategize classroom management with your peers. You clean up the messes of the day and try to check off the endless list of things you need to do. Eventually, when you are too tired to continue, you leave the rest of your list undone. Even after a years-long career, you’ve never really finished everything.
If you have your own kids, you might rush to get your phone calls done and leave as soon as your contract allows, toting a heavy bag of papers to grade and teaching materials to assemble, in addition to the emails you still need to write and the online tasks you still need to complete. You kiss your children and take them home and feed them. You put them to bed and debate whether to do the dishes or get started on your bag of work. Whichever one you choose means you’ll have more work to do tomorrow or over the weekend.
When you are a teacher in America, you make sure you go to the bathroom before your students come in, because for the next three or four hours, you will have twenty or thirty people relying on you. You can’t leave them without an adult in the room, and some years you don’t have support from a paraprofessional to allow you to step out. You have carefully designed and taught the routines of the day, making sure you stray from the usual schedule as rarely as possible, because without those routines a class full of children can easily spiral into chaos. Even with the routines, with your trained calm demeanor, you know that this system is delicate and a simple change of schedule or change in the weather can send your students into a spiral. A group of twenty or thirty students is like a storm. You can try to predict what they’ll do and prepare for it, but in the end it cannot be controlled.
You know that one of your students lives with a foster family and several others are being raised by grandparents or other extended family members other than their biological parents, though you don’t know all of their specific stories. When the bell rings, you know at least a handful of them don’t know where their next meal will come from. On Friday afternoon, some of them stuff a brown grocery bag of food sent from the school into their Pokemon and Hello Kitty backpacks and carry them home. You hope some of that food will make it into their belly. You know a little girl in your class goes home and tends her younger siblings, even though by your estimation, she is barely old enough to be left home alone. You suspect at least two or three of them have parents who are hard on them. You try not to jump to conclusions, but you can tell by the way the children speak to and about themselves, the way they talk to their friends, and they ways they respond to even the most gentle correction. You’re not sure what’s happening with your student who barely speaks and hides under the desks when they are stressed, but you are working hard to make sure they feel safe with you, and they are beginning to come out of their shell little by little.
Because of what you know about your students, you give them your time and your energy until your energy is gone, and then you give them just a little bit more. When you go home, you read the comments on a news article about a student at a local school who ran off. In the comments, community members sound off about how irresponsible and stupid the teachers and school staff must be. Even though restraining the student would have been illegal in your state, the commenters insist they would have stopped the kid physically anyway. Others are certain it was the teacher’s fault to begin with. She must have abused him or done something shitty to make the kid want to run away, they say. Your colleague across the hall has a student with a history of trying to run away from school, and you know they’ve had a couple of close calls. You’ve been involved in some of the strategizing about keeping them there, and the care that’s gone into planning what to do given that physically restraining the child is not allowed. But the people in the comments don’t know that. They don’t want to know that. They just know something is broken and they need to blame someone for its brokenness, so they blame you.
On Twitter, a thread comes through your feed explaining why the teacher strikes in another state are the result of teacher greed. “They don’t even work in the summers,” after all, and nobody sees the late nights at work. Nobody seems to understand the immense weight of being the most stable influence some of your students have in their lives, of feeling that their well-being rests at least partially on you, even though you are powerless over most of the factors that affect it.
Being a teacher in America means that you are are teaching students our society has systemically failed over, and over, and over again, and being told by community members, parents, and sometimes even your administrator, that all of the evidence of those failures as they manifest in the classroom are actually your fault. If you knew the right things to do and say, if you had the right skills, your students wouldn’t misbehave. Somehow they’d stop being hungry or homeless. They wouldn’t be carrying the trauma of having an incarcerated parent or a mom they haven’t seen in a year and half. They wouldn’t be carrying the weight of having to care for siblings, or even their own parents. They wouldn’t have to worry about whether their power would be turned off again in a few weeks or if they’d have heat during the forecasted cold snap, if only you knew how to do your job better. All of it is your fault.
I quit teaching long before the pandemic, but now I fear we are at a breaking point. Teachers are getting sick, and not just with COVID. The immense stress you are under as a teacher compromises your immune system and makes a normal cold a week-long respiratory illness that ends with pneumonia, bronchitis, pink-eye, a sinus infection, an ear infection, or some combination of those things.
Being a teacher in America means working yourself to the bone, at the expense of your own personal life, relationships, mental health, and physical health and still being held responsible for all the ways your students suffer. It means that you and your efforts will never be enough, and it’s all your fault.
Instead of holding to account our elected officials for denying people housing, health care, food, and other basic needs, we shift the blame around like brussels sprouts on a seven year-old’s plate. We blame teachers, we blame nurses, and we even blame individuals and families themselves for not being able to provide all of their needs themselves. After all, as long as we are busy blaming and punishing each other at the cost of our kids, we don’t ask questions about the man behind the curtain pulling the strings.
