Sunday, October 4, 2020

Soldiering in the Classroom

Edward Dwyer, singing a song teachers know well right now

This week on Thursday I had my first meltdown since the school year started. My last one came during the pre-school year prep and endless meetings, and the feeling that I was about to confront an impossible task. This one came as I thought about all the things I had to do that day, how difficult it would be to complete those tasks, and that every day for the foreseeable future would be this same dance of stress and anxiety. 

That thought weighed on me until I quietly flipped out on the inside. (My last meltdown was more vocal.) I kept asking myself, "How many days in a row of living to just get to the end of the day will there be until I just snap?" I went to bed that night in a daze.

When I woke up on Friday with the news of the president's diagnosis, the combination of the coming weekend and the frenzy of news distracted me long enough to not fall into another trough. The weekend has been great; my wife's sister is visiting from California and it's been lovely to catch up and for my daughters to have her around.

Now the Sunday night blues are looming. This week I not only have to teach my students in a difficult format and be a teaching assistant for my kids, I have to go into my school for two days of training to prepare for our hybrid launch in November. I am teaching asynchronous classes on these days, so I am basically pulling a double shift while enduring my grueling commute on top of it. Needless to say, I am not happy about it.

Thankfully I have a new mental frame of mind. A Gulf War marine vet who is also an educator posted something on Facebook about the crushing mental load, and discussed the motto in the service of "embrace the suck." This was reminding me of my mentality before the beginning of school year meetings broke my morale. Teachers are soldiering, but not in the way our politicians think by sending us into a deadly situation. 

I am talking more about mentality. I've read enough front-line memoirs that I think I understand the mental attitude needed to survive the test my fellow teachers and I are being put to. Unlike some of those soldiers, I even deeply believe in the cause I am fighting for: my students' education. As is often the case in war I am being sent in to do the job without proper support, but I will have to do it anyway. I may be given contradictory and sometimes downright nonsensical orders from superior officers, but I will have to follow them. It doesn't mean I have to like it or respect the people giving me the orders or refrain from complaining, though. That's always a soldier's prerogative. 

To use another well-worn soldier's phrase, "Shit rolls downhill." The officers in the rear avoid the shit details during peacetime, and now during wartime they are safe from any of the flying shrapnel and aim to keep it that way. That's certainly unfair, but there's also a war on, and though I have resigned to grumble and complain, I've also resigned to embrace the suck and fight. 

Teachers have discovered that we are basically on our own in this. Nevertheless, we have to soldier on. Keep up the fight so we can win, but when it's over it's time to demand a lot more from our schools and from our country. 

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