too much too much!

Okay F. Scott:
I was just looking through my Twitter stream and I got very overwhelmed. I follow a few educational movements (so to speak, edurati for example) and I found myself wondering how I was ever going to be able to make any sort of a contribution to any of these things. There's no time. I spent the whole day today responding to student drafts, and I didn't get them all done. Didn't make the pot of chili I planned so my family would have food for the week. Didn't pay bills (will have to do that tomorrow evening--takes me two hours usually). Didn't get the one house cleaning/organizing chore done that I had planned. Okay, I could have NOT gone to the zoo with my family on Saturday and gotten all of this done. But that doesn't work either. Family first--my husband and kiddo are more important than getting the papers read or the blog updated.

So it struck me: I want to cultivate a voice on things educational. I can't have that voice in all areas that I'd like to. So I have to pick the place and dedicate myself to it. I have to pick the outlet and make it work. Those conversations we have in the office (except for the loopy Friday afternoon ones--those are just hilarious, especially with the cast of characters that stop by the door and throw laughs at us) are significant and thought-provoking. Let's start talking regularly to an audience wider than the two of us and any hapless soul who happens to walk into our office when we're trying to solve all the problems of the world.

Is this blog the outlet? Perhaps. We have one follower. I know her. I told her about us. She's a great follower to have and will respond very insightfully when she's not totally swamped by the dissertation she's defending in a few weeks. We need to get more followers. How should we do that? I have a student who writes a sports blog and he has about 200 people who regularly read his stuff. He advertises his blog on Facebook. We might need to "out" ourselves to some people around us to get folks to start reading. Would our students care to read this stuff? Do we want to go there?

And I need to commit to a weekly blog update. I've had one rolling around in my head since last week. It's about "procedural display" and how to avoid it. Can't wait to read it, can you? :-)

Enough blabbering. I need to go to bed. See you at school.

M. Shelley

This is a direct response to F. Scott's most recent post:

Whereas teachers like you and I and those great idealist colleagues we work with can get burned out, disappointed, and beat down by how our idealism is constantly chipped away at by the daily demands of our job and the mountain of crap that we work around (those little cuts you describe), I believe that the idealists are the seeds and engine of change. We need to be there, working on change, one classroom, one student at a time. We need to find the time and the way to make our voices heard (which is why I will insist that we write about our professional development experiences this year--your idea for how we structure our professional development time rocks and it's an idea that should be out there for others to consider) (we will be writing about this later I am certain). We need to put pressure on our colleagues, our administrators, our district to be better--like we always push ourselves to be. We need to take a look at our week and carve out a place to do this work--one hour a week set aside to cultivate our voice and get it out there is more time than if we never did it at all.

Your post sounds a lot like where I was when I left the classroom for the new frontier of the doc program. My two years there away from the classroom showed me how much I truly belong in the high school classroom. The absence of the classroom in my life so clearly defined the space it fills in me. I need it to feel relevant and challenged. And this realization will keep me here for a very long time, regardless of all the frustrating crap that comes along with the life of a teacher in our school district.

But I will need to challenge myself every year to be better, to work more efficiently, to explore new ideas, to write about it. To imagine the possibilities for our students and make those possibilities the goal of my teaching. If I don't push myself to do this, I'll get antsy and bored.

This job--it's a life as you know. And you're damn good at it. You're thoughtful and you like your students, and you want to make sure you are doing right by them. You ask tough questions about your teaching and you really want to know how to do it better. You are an idealist--you DO imagine all the great possibilities for your students, and you believe they are possible even if they seem impossible to achieve. But I know that this kind of teaching is exhausting work.

Which is why we each need to decide for ourselves if we can and want to do it.

I'm here for good. My life has shown me, as I explained above, how much I need this work. And for my own selfish reasons, of course I would like for you to stick around. For me though, managing this work in my life means boundaries--times when I don't work and I am with my family. Times during my work week when I put the grading/planning aside and read research or do some writing. I need to think seriously about how to balance everything and be sure to carefully balance it all.

And maybe I need to find a way to steer clear of the parts of the job that make me feel bad, especially the parts that I have absolutely no control over no matter how bad they are (I'm talking here about the current issues surrounding our contract and the shady dealings of our district administration. It sucks, and I hate it, and I wish that we hard working teachers got the recognition and respect that we deserve. But the more I get caught up in the negative discourse flying around about all of this, the worse I feel.)

**********************

Today was the first day of school. Thus starts another school year. I'm full of enthusiasm and hope, excited to learn more about the teenagers I met today. I know there will be rough spots--there always are. And I'm sure I'll write about them. But for now, all is rosy.

And I attended a talk this evening at our local University--gave me much to think about. That will be the focus of my next post.

Signing off,

M. Shelley

Close to Home

Sarah Fine's eloquent essay in the Washington Post struck awfully close to home. You can read it in its entirety at the link above, and you should. She is leaving teaching after four short years, and while so much of my professional life is quite different from her's, so much is also the same.

I most definitely do not teach in an inner-city charter school. Many of the challenges she faced are at the least lessened, if not absent, in the school M. Shelly and I teach in. We are not a charter. For better or worse, we enjoy the protection of our union. Most of our students come to school ready, if not willing, to learn. A large portion of our students are even eager for education. My administration is generally supportive of me, and I have a high degree of autonomy in teaching. I work with wonderful, talented colleagues.

So why did Fine's essay resonate so strongly for me? I too am thinking about leaving the classroom. The continual expansion of the work load (especially by things that seem to have no benefit to my students), the relentless focus on high-stakes testing (even in a very 'good' school) mandated by NCLB, and the endless flow of barriers to actually connecting with students in meaningful ways are a constant drain. It is often a life of death by a thousand cuts. No one thing puts us over the top, but the accumulation buries us.

Most importantly though, Fine hit on one of the toughest parts of teaching for me.

Teaching is a grueling job, and without the kind of social recognition that accompanies professions such as medicine and law, it is even harder for ambitious young people like me to stick with it.

While every one of my parents and community members is appreciative to my face, the continual drumbeat of anti-teacher rhetoric at every level of this society is truly draining. The same parents who thank me write letters to the editor complaining about teachers demanding higher pay (not, for the record, anything that would constitute 'high' pay- our main, and apparently unreasonable, hope, is that our salary schedule could at least keep pace with inflation, which it has never done). Our district administration continually makes decisions and discusses teachers publicly in ways that devalue or show outright contempt for both teachers and the work they do. And the rhetoric and legislation of both the state and nation reflect a lack of interest and awareness of actual teaching that is frankly painful to me.

And, Like Fine, I am ambitious. Like her friend, I want to "do big things and be recognized for them." I'd like to do them working with kids, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of room for that in our society.

So, I am giving thought to doing some other things. Unlike Fine, I came into teaching in my thirties, with other professional experiences behind me. It has been invaluable to have that depth and grounding of experience as a teacher, but it also continually reminds me that I have other skills. I have a choice. I'm not sure yet what exactly the next thing in my life might be professionally, and I have a family to consider in these decisions.

I will be starting my eighth year in the classroom in the next few weeks, and while I look forward to, and am sustained by, my relationships with students and colleagues, I am also wondering if that is enough. It makes me very sad, and sometimes angry. I could spend a lot of time wishing for a different world, and sometimes I do (one has to be pretty idealistic to be a teacher at all). I just wish I felt like there was something more I could do with that idealism, something that meant staying in the classroom.

F. Scott