A Teacher Calls For The End of Teacher Appreciation Week

The thing that keeps me going as a teacher more than anything else is the genuine appreciation I get. For example, the seniors at my school just had their last day of regular classes and some of them said some really kind and complimentary things to me. The emotions in these moments can be overwhelming. After all, one of the hardest things about being a teacher is getting to know and mentor some amazing people then have to say goodbye to them year after year after year. I'm no good at good-byes.

Every year at my school the parents' association holds a tea for the faculty, which I also take joy from, especially when individual parents pay me compliments. It feels good to do work that makes a positive impact on people.

None of this genuine appreciation has to do with the thing we call Teacher Appreciation Week. The people who are kind enough to appreciate me would do so with or without some kind of official occasion. Teacher Appreciation Week is not about students and parents appreciating teachers, it is a time for lip service intended to keep teachers satisfied with scraps from the table.

Before the pandemic our pay sucked and our burdens kept increasing. Since the pandemic things have reached the breaking point and teachers are quitting in huge numbers. 

Over the past two years teachers have had to completely overhaul their entire practice from top to bottom to deal with the pandemic, some times more than once. In my case I had to convert everything to remote learning, and then to hybrid, and then to face to face, but a face to face accommodating for students missing due to individual quarantines and students suffering from the mental consequences of what they had endured. Most other white collar workers got to stay home (and complain online that teachers are lazy.) We have had to switch to doing things entirely differently more than once, and for the most part, we did it well.

During the pandemic my school, my wife's school, and my children's school had totally different protocols. This meant having to go to work in person when my kids could not physically attend school, a juggling act that almost broke me. Even when we were all home I would run out of a Zoom class, quickly prepare them a lunch, frantically respond to student messages while cramming ramen down my mouth, and jump back into a Zoom class. 10-12 work days were the norm, and then I had to start commuting again on top of that.

When I told it was time to go back in person every day last April I was given less than a week's notice. At that time my wife was already back full time, but my kids' school was still fully remote. Like I said, it almost broke me.

But I am still one of the fortunate ones. My school has taken COVID safety very seriously. We are a progressive private school and so I have not been flogged in the current wave of cultural combat singling out teachers and trying to destroy them for teaching the actual history of this country. These attacks are our compensation for all the work we did on the front lines keeping children educated during an unprecedented emergency. Our Herculean labors have been paid with scorn, derision, and hate. Thankfully it's a hot labor market and more teachers can escape this awful situation and find something to do with their time that pays more money and costs less stress. 

After all of this all teachers are going to get from their political leaders and administrators is a pile of canting flattery. If Teacher Appreciation Week doesn't come with smaller classes, more autonomy, better pay, and more respect the people who trot out the same bullshit platitudes this every year can just keep their big mouths shut. Just one of the heartfelt letters I got this year from a student thanking me for their college letter of recommendation is equivalent to a thousand of the bland emails from school boards and political leaders. At least I knew the student actually meant it. Unless Teacher Appreciation Week comes with actual material improvements for teachers I will keep assuming it is worse than meaningless.

A Teacher's Bitter Christmas Reflection

As a kid I did not get the holiday blues. This was the best time of the year, dammit! Present and mountains of candy and cookies and parties. As I have aged it has come into focus how the holiday season forces reflection, and that's not always a fun thing. I think every year of Christmases past, and the people I celebrated with who are dead now.

I also tend to think about what I've done over the past year. In this second COVID year it has been a bitter reflection. The year started with the dark COVID winter and it is ending with the Omnicron surge. Back in June I was naive enough to think it was ending. Oh how wrong I was.

That also coincided with the end of the end of the 2020-2021 school year, one where I had to completely alter my teaching practice from top to bottom not once but twice. First to go remote, and then to go hybrid. I worked twelve hour days every day and dealt with having to go to work when my kids' school still had them remote. 

My reflection has become bitter because I have realized that all of this labor has added up to nothing.

I am not getting a single extra penny of compensation from my job. I have not been given any more respect, either from my employer or my students and their parents. All that effort and work was appreciated by my students in the moment, but its long-term impact is basically zero.

Meanwhile my kids' education horribly suffered, and I failed to halt it because I was spending all my efforts teaching other people's kids. What reward did I get for this? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Looking back on it I can't believe what a complete sucker I was. 

Well, as the old saying goes, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, same on me. The days of heroic sacrifice for no reward are over. I wonder when school leaders are finally going to figure this out. 

Love, Labor, and Exploitation

Like a lot of other people I have been thinking a lot lately about work and its meaning. After four decades of neoliberal propaganda proclaiming workaholism a necessary condition rather than a disorder, the centrality of work to our lives looks increasingly perverse and unbalanced. The fact that teachers like me in particular have worked harder under more stressful conditions than ever without any additional compensation or respect or workplace power has been especially glaring. 

Back when I was a callow undergraduate I had decided that whatever I did with my career, it would be something I enjoyed and that made the world a better place. Goodbye law school, hello grad school. Even after I jumped ship from academia I landed in secondary education. I know I am smart enough to have gone to law school and started making more money than I do now after decades of teaching in my first year at the bar. Despite that I opted to join one of the lowest paid of the educated professions. (I think only social workers have us beat.)

It is certainly true that despite the difficulty and stress of my job, that I enjoy it most of the time and feel like my hard work is having a positive impact on the world. At the same time, my older worries that educators are exploited through the love we give have only intensified. Last year I was an "essential worker" riding empty commuter trains, trying to juggle teaching other people's kids when mine weren't allowed into their school until May of 2021. The question thus arises of whether I would be better off in a meaningless job that I do not "love" with much lower stress and better pay. This is a calculation that a lot of teachers are making.

There is one thing staying my hand, however. While I am very sympathetic to the voices saying that we need to be working less and centering our lives around things outside of work, they sometimes miss a crucial fact. Work is the thing we do more than anything else with our waking hours upon this earth. When you have a shit job (I have had some in my day) you feel like the hours of your life are being stolen from you, spent in boredom and empty toil. It is an absolutely soul-crushing feeling, a kind of emotional torture. 

(Notice, of course, that the journalists and writers saying we should not look to work for fulfillment aren't quitting their writing gigs to become line cooks or HR specialists.) 

If I had to spend eight hours of my day (or more, most likely) doing something I didn't believe in I would probably fall into a state of suicidal depression. Having a soul only when the quitting time whistle blows is not how I want to go through life. 

In the meantime I keep asking myself how to stop my work from taking over my life. Last Saturday, for example, I decided I just wasn't going to do any schoolwork, I needed to rest. I wonder if I can allow myself to take longer to grade my students' work, to be more willing to recycle suboptimal lessons rather than spending several evening hours constructing a new one that may not even work. Teachers are always told to do these extra sacrifices "for the kids' but I never hear doctors being told to do uncompensated labor "for the patients" or lawyers to not bill for all their hours "for the clients." 

My hope for the "Great Resignation" is that all of these individual refusals can somehow add up to a collective reorientation around work expectations. I love what I do, but I will not be suckered. Those days are over. 

Teaching After the War

Longtime readers know I am a huge John Le Carre fan. One of my favorite moments in his novels comes in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy when George Smiley pays a visit to Connie Sachs, a crack MI6 researcher forced into retirement. After trading thoughts on a possible mole in the organization, she remembers World War II. In her words "Englishmen could be proud then." The Cold War seemed sordid and unworthy by comparison. 

As a teacher this school year I too feel a little adrift after the last school year, which felt a lot like fighting a war. Every day brought new challenges and almost impossible tasks. My schedule, my wife's schedule, and my children's schedule could all change at the drop of a hat, triggering a cascade of difficulties. On many days I would be with my kids at home, trying to supervise their learning and make lunch for them while teaching my own classes. 

It was horrible, but I also felt like I had a real mission. I also think I happened to do a good job with it. Against all the odds and with an endless string of twelve hour days, I somehow managed to make the impossible work. I have to say it is among the things I've done I am most proud of.

This year it's all "normal" except for masks and a few other protocols. The day to day teaching is more fulfilling because I actually get to be with my all my students at once, but the feeling of heroism is gone. Last year I got more gratitude from my students and superiors than ever, in recognition of faculty's Herculean efforts to move heaven and earth to keep the learning going. Now I enjoy my classes more but feel a lot less appreciated. 

This was probably inevitable, and it's part of a general disillusionment so many workers are feeling right now. We were "essential," we went into the front lines, we did our bit and made huge sacrifices only to find ourselves right back where we started. Everyone else just kind of wants to pretend that unrequited sacrifice didn't happen. The problem is I can't forget it. Don't think I ever will.

Watching Ikiru on School Year's Eve

I start back at school tomorrow. It's not the first day of classes, but the ever-metastasizing gauntlet of meetings and trainings that educators must go through before the school year starts. (How else will the ever-growing corps of administrators justify their existence?)

Due to how awful and difficult the last school year was and the Delta surge I had been thinking about this school year with a great deal of anxiety and trepidation. I look around at my non-educator friends who are also white collar professionals but aren't expected to show up to the office most days and get resentful. I think about all of the sacrifices and extra work I did over the last year and a half in order to completely alter my teaching practice from top to bottom TWICE, which was not rewarded with extra pay from my employer or respect from other people in society, many who really seem to hate teachers. I saw the latter as a history educator this summer, witnessing the reactionary mobs scream about "critical race theory" and making laws that would basically make it illegal in many places to teach the actual events of American History. After a year and a half of wearying sacrifice, it felt like getting punched in the face.

Reader, I will be honest and admit I did a thought experiment last week. I asked myself, if I was offered some dumb useless corporate job that paid me the same as my modest salary and allow me to work from home half the time, would I take it? I decided I would take it in a heartbeat. 

Today I changed my mind because of a Japanese movie from 1952.

With the school year looming and my kids in day camp and my wife at work, I decided to use Monday and Tuesday this week to watch the movies I would not subject my family to but which require too much concentration for me to watch late at night when everyone is asleep. Today I decided to watch Ikiru, since I love Kurosawa but have mostly watched his movies set far off in the past.

Ikiru's title means "To Live." It is the story of a local bureaucrat named Kanji Watanabe. At the start of the film he is an old man detached from those around him, focused on his work but mostly just pushing paper and avoiding actually doing anything of substance. His diligence and hesitance to rock the boat helped him rise to the top of his department, but he is clearly not a happy man. He then discovers that he has stomach cancer, and thus six months to live.

At this point he questions his life. His wife had died years before and he had dedicated himself to providing for his son. However, his workaholic ways meant he never emotionally connected with him, and his son is thus more concerned about his inheritance than his father's health. This of course breaks his heart, and he first reacts to impending death by becoming decadent, going out to bars and brothels. This does not satisfy, so he strikes up a friendship with a young woman who clerked in his office. She still has a zest for life which lifts his spirit, but as a young person she gets bored with their relationship. At this point Watanabe realizes what he needs to do. He goes back to work.

However, he does not go back to work as before. At the beginning of the film we see a group of women trying to get a cesspool in their neighborhood covered and a playground built. They get the runaround from Watanabe, who as the head of Public Affairs is supposed to be helping them. When he goes back he throws himself into this project, pushing the stodgy bureaucrats in the other departments to get this important work done. The day the park is completed, he dies, satisfied that he had actually done something. At his funeral dinner the other bureaucrats try to avoid giving him credit for the park, but the mothers come in weeping, despondent that they lost the one man with power who had actually listened to them. The bureaucrats then realize they too should be spending their lives more fruitfully.

It's often not pleasant to think about death, but it is clarifying. Yes teaching under COVID is grueling, and yes it forces me to take risks and reimagine my work in ways I would not have had to do had I gone to law school. Needless to say, it pays a lot less, too. But this film was a reminder to me that my work MATTERS. At a time when reactionaries are trying to force false propaganda about the past on our students, my work in the classroom is necessary. I know too that what I do has had an impact on so many people who still bother to remember me and talk to me. That's what gets me up in the morning. Now time to get to work. 

Coming Home From the COVID Teaching Trenches

This song was one of my angsty quarantine survival mainstays

Vera Brittain's memoir Testament of Youth is most famous for the sections about her time as a nurse in the Great War. Not only did she witness several people die in that role, the war also took her brother, fiance, and one of her closest friends. Her book is harrowing proof of how war can traumatize those who don't hold a rifle or have their homes bombed. 

I have always been particularly struck by the way she recalled the announcement of the Armistice. She said people didn't say "the war is over" but "war is over." War had become their mode of being. Brittain herself was more stunned than jubilant, unable to forget that three people so important to her were never coming back and would never live in the peace she had to face by herself. 

As my school year is winding down I am having a very difficult time adjusting to life outside of the teaching trenches. I have basically been in crisis mode since the middle of March last year. Most of my summer "break" last year was spent preparing for this school year. The year itself brought untold stress and multiple moments where the rug was pulled out from under me. My children's school didn't open until early May, but on the way there were false starts and schedule changes that threw our lives into chaos. My own work gave me less than a week's notice to adjust to five days a week in person rather than two, at a time when my daughters' school was still closed. 

I got used to living a truly day to day existence where I could not count on anything being stable or secure. Out of the blue my wife or I might get a new directive from our jobs or our children's school, or news of COVID cases in our school or our daughters' child care facility. We might suddenly find out that we would need to eat thousands of dollars of new child care costs or that our child care would not be available that day. 

All through it I was working twice as hard as normal, frantically trying to keep everything together. Hybrid teaching was like swimming with twenty pound weights on my ankles. To not sink I just had to keep flailing myself forward until I made it to the shore. I did it all with the knowledge that despite my desperate toil it was not as good as what I would normally be able to provide my students.

Friday was graduation day at my school. I didn't stick around too long after because I was afraid of having an emotional breakdown in the parking lot in front of everybody. I have three days of meetings and a ceremony for last year's graduates left and I am almost happy for mundane meetings to give me something to do. Adjusting to life without the day to day bombs falling this summer is going to be hard. 

There doesn't seem to be much discussion of how educators have endured some bad shit this year and might be experiencing some emotional fallout this summer. I spent last summer in a constant state of worry and anticipation, never able to relax with the sword of Damocles that was the 2020-2021 school year hanging over my head. I had multiple anxiety attacks and by mid-August just wanted my break to be over so I could face the reality of the year instead of spiraling into fear.

I managed to survive the year, but I can honestly say it was worse than anticipated. Now that I am on the other end I don't know how to relax, my whole body just feels tense all of the time. Hell, that's why I am spending my Saturday night writing a blog post. I am so used to forward motion that rest is impossible. It's the law of emotional physics.

I have started to plan things with the understanding that I will need to be active or else likely fall into a crushing depression. In true dad fashion I am imaging home improvement, gardening and lawn projects. I have two different pieces of scholarly writing on the front burner and three or four essays I will be shopping to online outlets waiting to be written. We are planning on hitting the open road, but I am also looking to have as many local experiences as possible, too, from hiking to going to Mets games to outdoor Shakespeare to going down the Shore to the beach. I am planning on finally home brewing some beer. I will make even more pies and maybe learn to do cream pies next. I have a whole stack of summer reading on deck, too.

In past years I would worry I am making a ridiculous summer to do list, but this year it's a matter of spiritual survival. I hope the rest of my fellow educators can find ways to restore themselves after what we've been through. 

The Consolation of M*A*S*H

I have recently returned to an old ritual to help me weather the hard days at the end of the long road that's been teaching and parenting under COVID: watching M*A*S*H reruns. Instead of catching them in the late afternoon or late at night on the local CBS affiliate as I used to, I can binge to my heart's content on Hulu.

Some of the attraction is just pure comfort, like an old sweater or a family recipe. The sound of the theme song and the cast's distinctive voices is a kind of salve to my soul. Back in my Chicago days my friend and roomie Dave and I would watch the daily nighttime rerun for that reason. It was a great way to disengage and take a break from life for awhile.

Under COVID, however, the show's deeper meaning has become clearer and clearer. It is a show about people doing absolutely necessary work in disheartening conditions beyond their control. It is about doing that job when your bosses, coworkers, and general circumstances are conspiring against you in completely unpredictable ways. It is about maintaining your humanity and good humor when everything around you is broken.

I must admit, this is the feeling I had as a teacher-parent in the last fifteen months. I know my job is important, I know if must get done, but some days can just be completely agonizing. We have had so many instances this year of having our work or child care arrangements changed at the drop of a hat. At the height of the pandemic I pretty much stopped planning anything more than a day in advance because any plan was bound to get shattered. 

The characters on the show can never relax either, because a crisis is always ready to happen or a helicopter full of wounded is about to arrive. The downtime isn't really relaxation because they can never fully let their guard down. The still in Hawkeye's tent stays humming because booze is the only surefire escape. Let's just say I know a thing or two about this dynamic. 

Even though the members of the 4077th are supposed to be united in a common cause, they are riven by divisions and resentments. Despite the horror of the circumstances Frank Burns still does his power plays and members of the unit clash and snipe with each other. The experience of surviving this situation simultaneously draws some people together and pushes others apart. When the worst crises hit, however, they mostly find a way to get the job done. I will be diplomatic and say I understand this dynamic too. 

The same can be said of the ways that leadership behaves in M*A*S*H. Colonels Blake and later Potter are kind and understanding, but when any general or other outside bigwig appears they just end up causing problems and wasting people's time. The running character of intelligence officer Colonel Flagg does not not do anything other than antagonize the doctors and push them around. There are constant reminders that the doctors of the M*A*S*H unit are grunts whose life-saving labor is barely acknowledged by the powers that be. It is akin to how educators are often seen as an obstacle rather than a resource by their administrators. 

COVID for teacher-parents like myself has a been a kind of purgatory, much like the Korean War in M*A*S*H. You know someday it's going to end, but you have no clue when. You hope to get back to "normal," but you know deep down that normal is never coming back and that your experience has permanently altered who you are. The show's last episode was the most watched thing in television history when it aired in 1983, and not just because it was a popular show. Plenty of other shows have been more popular. There was something deeper going on there. The characters on the show meant something to the audience, who needed to see them finally escape and go home.

After all, that was not a foregone conclusion. The killing off of Colonel Blake has to be one of the most shocking moments in TV history. It was done because the show's creators wanted to remind everyone that this was indeed a war they were witnessing, and wars have casualties. I have been lucky this year not to lose anyone to COVID but at the height of the pandemic riding the train into school while all my white collar professional friends were at home I was keenly aware that my health and perhaps my life were on the line. 

So at the end of my work day, which usually involves passing out on the train at some point, and my post-work day of grading and answering emails, I put on M*A*S*H reruns. The theme song and opening credits, perhaps the most melancholy in television history, hit me like like a shot of spiritual novocaine. The credits are a reminder that the doctors are only stitching up wounded soldiers so they can get sent back into the line and shot again. There's no better metaphor for the necessity and futility of my daily life since March of 2020. 

One Too Many Mornings

This is my last full week of classes for the 2020-2021 school year and I look and feel like twenty miles of bad road. I didn't really have a summer last year, since most of my waking hours were consumed with anxiety, dread, and preparation for the coming school year. This has felt like the longest school year ever partially because it effectively began on the first day after the 2019-2020 school year ended.

I made myself an expert in all kinds of classroom technologies. I completely altered my practice. I learned how to teach students in person and distanced simultaneously. During my work days I was often also my children's teacher's aide, school cook, and janitor all rolled into one. There were plenty of left turns, like my wife and I needing to be in school when my daughters' school wasn't open, or getting less than a week's notice that I would need to be at school five days a week rather than two. It was fun to know at the drop of a hat that I was about to eat two thousand dollars worth of child care costs.

And through it all, all of the 14 hour days and stress freakouts and questioning why I didn't go to law school instead, I could not escape the thought that all this effort added up to a learning product that was inferior to what I could give my students in the Before Times. That thought, always in the back of my mind, has been soul crushing. Was all of this even worth it? Does anyone even care? Will anyone remember it when we go back to "normal"?

***

One of my favorite Bruce Springsteen songs comes at the end of his Ghost of Tom Joad album, a kind of spiritual sequel to Nebraska. Like the earlier album, it contains searing indictments of America in the throes of neoliberalism and wracked by inequality, mostly set to spare accompaniment. The song is "My Best Was Never Good Enough," one of the great songs of defeat. He sarcastically spews a bunch of feel good cliches like "when the going gets tough, the tough get going" with the kind of contempt you never hear from the Boss. He taunts (with profanity!) these idiotic bromides that are used to get people to blame themselves for their misfortune. In the end, with the game rigged and the deck stacked, "my best was never good enough."

That's pretty much how I feel about this school year. All the toxic positivity told us that all of our efforts would pay off, that we would get through this together etc etc. It's all the usual bullshit. We worked our asses off, we sacrificed more than ever, and ended up just muddling through. It's been one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind, as the old Dylan song says. 

Please please dear God just get me through these last days of school so I can finally make it stop. 

Notes on Teachers Appreciation Week

America is full of "hero" jobs. These are occupations that come with a lot of public praise, but also the expectation that if you work these jobs you are supposed to keep your mouth shut. The scope of this designation has expanded under COVID with the new term "essential workers." 

While the desk jockeys and bean counters have been able to stay at home, the essential workers have been delivering their groceries, slaughtering their meat, preparing their food, tending to them in the hospital, and yes, taking care of and teaching their children. This work has involved great personal risk (just look at the COVD death rate among line cooks.) It has not been met with additional compensation or power in the workplace. Instead we hear a litany of bosses bitching that they can't get enough workers to beg them for their shit jobs. 

The only added compensation has been in the form of lip service. I am thinking about that a lot this week, which is Teacher Appreciation Week. In normal years I groan a little at the noblesse oblige of it but appreciate the tokens of gratitude that come with it. This year it just makes me angry. 

Few other professions have been forced to so fundamentally change their practice. Each and every lesson I do had to be completely re-thought and done in ways I had never done before, all on the fly. After getting used to the virtual classroom, I then had to transition to the hybrid classroom where my brain must be in real and virtual space simultaneously. I have had to switch modes on a dime with little warning. The bean counters and desk jockeys haven't had to do all that much, except for learning how to use Zoom.

Our reward for our Herculean labors? Nothing.

Or I should say, nothing if we are lucky. If we are unlucky our reward is layoffs, furloughs, and legions of parents attacking us on social media. All the talk of "essential workers" just rings so hollow. I know plenty of parents are legitimately grateful for my work, but being reminded of that is more a salve for their souls than it is a benefit to me. 

It's obvious that if this society "appreciates" teachers it needs to put its money where its mouth is. 

Spring Cleaning

My spring break has just begun and I have not felt this unburdened since August. Christmas break had its own unique stresses and it took place in the midst of the worst of the pandemic. Now I am fully vaccinated and the weather is improving. Just this weekend I converted my screened-in back porch from a winter storage space to a warm weather hangout spot. 

While doing so yesterday I couldn't help but to think of the last time I cleaned the porch. It was at the start of quarantine, and back then I told myself I would have to keep busy around the house as a way to keep from losing my mind. I didn't just tidy up the porch, I gave it a ridiculously deep cleaning well beyond my usual standards. At that stage of quarantine the enormity of the situation gave me a kind of manic energy that found its expression in some pretty unlikely ways.

A year later that spirit is pretty much gone. I'm tired, both in body and soul. My job and my life have become one constant triage with constant fires to put out. There was a sort of excitement of rising to the challenge last year when I would have to get up from my computer after teaching a Zoom class to get lunch on for my kids while frantically responding to students taking an asynchronous class. Now when I have to do this I wish so hard that it would just finally end. 

It's all become a blur, day after day of working 11 hours at my job while tutoring my children and cooking and cleaning through it all. Except for the two days a week that I have to ride the train into the city and come home after it's done dead on my feet and sometimes still needing to cajole my children into doing their homework.

My spring break couldn't come soon enough because I think I was getting close to the point of exhaustion. That's usually the case even during a normal school year. And like in those years the time from then to summer is the final stretch, a thought that sustains many a teacher through April. I am trying to use spring break not just to clean my house, but to clean out my mind too. Maybe some time sitting on my back porch will help with that.

Teachers Need Consideration, Too

From the beginning of the pandemic educators have been hearing a constant message that we need to be extra patient with our students, to be careful of workload, and to generally go out of our way to be even more understanding than usual when they are unable to complete their work.

And you know what? I 100% agree with this. I tried to have all this in mind in the Before Times, but I have taken it even more to heart in the last year. I have reduced the work I assign, willing to lose coverage to benefit my students' mental health. I have been less stingy in handing out good grades and a softer touch with suboptimal student work. Right now there are much bigger fish to fry than holding the line between a B+ and A-.

However, educators do not seem to be getting the same consideration. Teaching in a pandemic is inherently much harder, at least if you want your teaching to be good. It requires converting every single lesson into a new format, arranging all of the electronic platforms, and teaching over Zoom, which is like swimming with a twenty pound weight attached to your ankle. Teaching hybrid might give needed actual contact with students, but it is physically and mentally exhausting to be in real space and cyberspace simultaneously. 

I regularly pass out on the couch at the end of the day. I typically work 10-11 hour days during the week, with a few hours of work on the weekend, too. I am starting to see my own children wear out and struggle in virtual school, but by the time I am able to help them with their studies I have spent all of my energy. 

My family is doing all of this with an almost impossible hill to climb. While my children's school remains virtual and I go in twice a week to mine, my wife has to come in five days a week. You try to figure that out. Teacher-parents have basically been told to go jump in a lake by just about everyone. No government subsidies for child care, no coordination between school districts, no child care assistance from our employers. 

On top of all of this teachers are still going through the same evaluation process from their schools. They still have the same load of meetings. (How else will administrators be able to justify their existence, after all?) Sometimes they even get browbeaten for not talking more in meetings at the end of a ten hour day spent teaching over Zoom and juggling child care responsibilities. 

Our reward for all this work is going to be layoffs, pay cuts, and resentment from the public. The attacks on teachers unions are already back and you can't wade into a conversation about school reopenings without somebody shitting all over teachers. I personally think the science on the safety of re-opening is pretty clear but I won't join with local people trying to reopen the schools here because I am not going to make common cause with those who wish to destroy my family's livelihood. It's bad enough to be doing all this extra work in trying circumstances, being treated with contempt as a result is unbearable. 

So please, give us a break before we break. 

Dispatches From The Front

Wilfred Own Knows What's Up

Back in September as the school year began I likened the difference between teaching in March when the virus hit to going back for a new year to the difference between World War I and World War II. The first time out I was full of the vigor and enthusiasm of taking a leap into the unknown, as dangerous as it could be. My attitude was all Rupert Brooke "swimmers into cleanness leaping" and all that. After surviving those months of remote learning to be thrown into hybrid learning in the fall, my enthusiasm was gone. All that was left was a devotion to duty. In September of 1939 there were no jubilant crowds on the streets of the combatant countries, just fear, resignation, and some quiet resolve. 

I have done my best to fulfill that duty all while hoping and praying that this all ends soon. I have been uplifted by the spirit of my students, which has truly impressed me, as well as many of my front-line comrades, and even some of the commanding officers. 

This morning I had enough time to actually reflect, and something hit me really hard. I have become inured to the ridiculous demands of teaching hybrid while parenting children in remote school with a spouse required to go to school every class day. I get up in the morning and shoulder the burden and get to work not even thinking about how impossible the task is or how ridiculous any of this would have been to conceive of a year ago. I just do it.

I realized this morning that this attitude is what has kept me from having a nervous breakdown. At the same time, I feel like part of my soul has died and won't be coming back. The same thing happened in my last years in academia, where some of my natural generosity and openness got permanently destroyed after it led me to be taken advantage of. The experience made me a harder person, and definitely not a better one. 

Right now I am starting to get tunnel vision. For example, I am no longer bothered when I hear and see people I love and care about being reckless in their behavior towards the virus. They are adults. Just let them do what they want. If they want to be careless, fine. I can't stop them and trying to will just make them mad. I can only hunker down and protect the people in my household and hope all turns out well. It's really the only thing I can control. 

So the war goes on, with no end in sight. The only thought that fazes me anymore is the idea that there never will be an end. I find that unbearable but I have little reason to think otherwise. Tonight I will rest and try not to think about it. Tomorrow I will be back in the trenches doing the impossible, but at least the work occupies my mind and gives me a reason to care. See you at the front, comrades. 

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. 

Letters of Recommendation

The seniors at my school are in the middle of the college application process, which means I am currently in the thick of letters of recommendation season. This year I have over twenty letters to write. This is a function of teaching juniors, and as difficult as it can be, I always cherish it. I am aware of just how much responsibility I have over my students’ future, and I take it very seriously. Being able to help them on their way in life is an example of how the work of teaching means making a positive impact on others.

It also reminds me of the difference in mentality between teaching high school and being a college professor. As a college professor I wrote letters of recommendation, but far fewer in the average year than I do now. Those letters also tended to be spaced out over the course of the year, while nowadays I have to do them in a massive flurry of activity. It’s not easy work, but I am also aware that it is an essential part of my job.

It also reminds me why I’m glad I’m not a professor anymore when I read articles like the one in the Chronicle today on the burden of letter writing for some professors. Like just about anything professors do, it’s considered an undue impediment for Working On Your Research. The only thing that’s never seen as a waste of time for professors is working on research. Spending too much time on teaching and advising are always warned against. The almighty god of research must be kept happy.

While the article is right that the work is uncompensated and often falls harder on some more than others (which I am well aware of), it is wrong to treat it as less important than doing research. Most academics need to realize that their research isn’t all that important. Few people are likely to read it, and those who do will turn it into a footnote, at best. Writing a letter of recommendation means making a direct impact on a person’s life. Isn’t that a much more significant thing than writing a journal article that will barely be read?

The same goes for teaching. If you are an academic you will make a far bigger impact on the lives of the people sitting in your classroom than anyone on a conference panel. I enjoy being a high school teacher for many reasons, but the biggest is that my work MATTERS and I work in an environment where others feel that way too. As a professor I published research that did not align with the fields of my colleagues, so it meant nothing to them. As a teacher I am part of a team motivated by the collective responsibility to teach our students well.

The older I get the more I try to focus on what matters in life. What matters most is other people and my relationship to them. My kids and wife mean more than my career. At school my students matter most. I'm glad to be working in an environment where human relationships are prioritized. It's a shame that the academy isn't like that more.

"Southern Cross" (Track of the Week)

I am a big believer in the notion that there is no such thing as a guilty pleasure, at least how the category is usually constructed. We like what we like, and should never feel bad for what we like not being hip enough. I think, however, that one can feel embarrassed. I call such things "sheepish pleasures."

One of my sheepiest pleasures is the song "Southern Cross" by Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Not only are they the avatars of the Boomers turning the 60s into a lifestyle brand, this song comes from the early 80s, well after their hour had passed. Back in the 90s the underrated Request magazine had a "Geezer" category in its reviews section exactly for stuff like this. It was all treated as a kind of joke, the lamest of lame music.

Despite that stigma, I think "Southern Cross" is my favorite CSN song (when you add the Y that's another story.) Age has weathered the group's voices a little, giving their famous harmonies a little something deeper in their sound. It's also not just hippy dippy stuff in the lyrics, either. It's a song about sailing as a metaphor for searching, of hitting some rough seas in your life and getting out of it and being reading to go to new horizons.

I love this theme because it is so transparently about *gulp* middle age. In my youth I disdained this music for that very reason, but now it resonates so clearly with me. I first really started appreciating this song the summer after I moved from Texas to New Jersey to start my new life post-academia. I had survived some stormy oceans and almost got shipwrecked along the way. My new lease on life felt like a miracle.

I was remembering that feeling yesterday on the commuter train ride home. It was the last day of classes for the school year, and I was feeling that usual sense of accomplishment and exhaustion. It's a sublime emotion that I never felt before I set sail from the familiar waters of my academic training into the uncharted seas of teaching high school. A new and better world was revealed to me, as foreign to the old one as the Southern Cross for a sailor who had never crossed the equator before. I'm so glad I made that journey.

A Teacher's Due

This week ends the fourth term of the school year, with just one more to go. This has been an especially tough term, mostly because I am teaching an overload with four different preps. I am back in the frenzied mode I occupied as a beginning teacher, working from before dawn to after dusk, all only to just stay afloat. It's something I could handle back when I was 31 and single, but now that I am 43 with a family (and a long commute) it's taken me to the breaking point.

It hasn't helped that members of my extended family have been stirring up drama and cruelty, or that the political situation seems so bleak. Over spring break, for the first time that I can remember, I asked myself if teaching was even what I was meant to do on this earth. As always in times of great stress, I started hating on myself, thinking that I had lost my mojo.

Students of course do not know the internal struggles that we teachers have, nor should they. Today that was my saving grace. One of my senior electives ended today, and my students gave me a round of applause and thanked me for the class. I don't think they have any way of knowing just how much that has uplifted me today.

So now I am kicking myself for having been so down on myself. (The self-flagellation never ends with me, folks.) Despite my exhaustion, what mattered was that I still put the effort in, even on days when my nerves were shredded and my patience was shot. Teaching is a job where the reward never comes in the form of money or social status. Day after day I see articles about teacher shortages. and of teachers leaving the profession.

It's a hard job that demands both intellectual and emotional labor, the latter being the most draining. When I tell people I teach, there's a good chance that they will say something completely idiotic, like "it must be good to have your summers off." (If teaching were so easy we would not be seeing such turnover, but I digress.) This reflects the dominant American idea that work is measured in the numbers of hours of labor, not its intensity. That's a fundamentally flawed metric. As we all know, and hour of combat is not the same as a quiet hour spent on base. Being in the classroom is like being at the battle front for half the year. Without break time we would go berserk.

As tough as the job is, it is hard to top a moment like I had today. Every morning I wake up thankful that I spend my days doing work that MEANS SOMETHING. I am not just pushing papers or acting as a gear in the corporate machine. It's probably the only reason that turnover isn't higher in the profession. I'm just glad that I teach students so willing to give me thanks. I wish every teacher were so lucky.

August Dread

We put our daughters in camp this week and next, mostly because my wife's job starts up well before the school year. Last summer was her first in the new position and we didn't do this and I almost went nuts from having to wrangle two hyper and bored four year olds by myself for three weeks. This camp time has been nothing short of blissful. Today I sat on the back porch with a book and a cup of coffee, listening to Tusk as the leaves rustled in the gentle breeze. Earlier I started cranking out an essay for publication. In my relaxed state this week I had already written two others. I don't want these days to end.

But soon they will. For teachers August is the Sunday of months, a mix of relaxation and dread.

Those jerkoffs who always think teachers have their summers "off" never understand that our work is akin to being front line soldiers. Without leave we would lose our minds and the ability to keep fighting. Summer feels less like a break than a rotation out of the trenches. Like a World War I soldier, I am keenly aware when I am away that I will have to go back.

This is not meant to be a complaint. I love my current job more than any other job I've had. This year, as in the others, there were hugs and tears at graduation, and the kind of gratitude that warms my heart like nothing else. But getting to that point requires a truly monumental expense of mental, emotional, and physical energy. In my case I dread not the demands of teaching as much as my commute. It's an hour each way if everything goes right, which would be bad enough, but lately that hasn't been the case. Just getting to the train on time each morning requires a ritual of clockwork precision which includes walking the dog, preparing breakfast for my children, and getting a couple of headstrong toddlers out of bed and out the door before the sun comes up. I am usually worn out even before I get to my train, a train so crowded that half the time I do not even get to sit down.

Between my work, commute, and child care responsibilities on an average work day I get about two hours of free time if I am lucky. Some days it's none. I used to expand that time by staying up too late, but that had a lot of bad side effects, from fatigue to crankiness. Last year I resolved to get seven hours of sleep a night, and I mostly held to that. (Watching the World Series made that difficult, though.)

Soon the cycle will start all over again. As much as I am feeling the dread, I know that on that first day of class that I will answer the bell and will be full of energy and enthusiasm. At the end of the day, that's what you have to do if you want to be a teacher, and why so few people make it past their first few years, even with their "summer off."

Graduation Is The Sweetest Time For a Prof Turned Teacher

Graduation day is the day when "This Is Where I Belong" by the Kinks becomes my theme song

Today was my high school's graduation, and by that I mean the school where I teach. It is the day of the year, above all the others, that confirms my decision to leave academia to become a teacher.

When I was a professor, attending graduation was a chore mandated by the university. (We had to go to one per year.) While I was always excited to cheer on favorite students who were graduating, the event was mostly a sterile reading of names. (I learned to go to the summer graduation, because it was shorter and because the keynote speech was given by a fellow prof, meaning it was better than the others we usually got.) The last graduation I went to at my university happened right after I had accepted my job offer at a high school in New York, but before I had informed the university and my chair. (I had to wait until Monday.) At this point I was so estranged from my surroundings that I drank two stiff bloody marys for breakfast and drove to the graduation blasting early Fall singles.

Flash forward to today, when I showed up an hour early to mingle with the students before the ceremony. During that time one student tearfully told me I was the best teacher she ever had, and would miss me. Another told me I was a role model for him going forward in life. I have a tremendous amount of respect for both of these students, and I almost just started breaking down and crying right there. Afterwards there were not just students but parents hugging me and wishing me well and testifying to how much they appreciated my work. Again, it was hard to keep it together. I finally broke when I got home and opened the card a student had given me expressing her gratitude. I don't want to get into the details, but it was so heartfelt and flattering that I am still shaken by it.

Until I became a teacher I never knew that I was capable of having such an effect on other people's lives. Sure, there were glimpses of this when I was a prof, but nothing approaching this level. I have never felt in my life such a sense of meaning and importance in my work. What happened today, and what I did to build those relationships is a million times more important and meaningful than any monograph I could write, any conference paper I could give, any research that I could do. The connections forged in the high school classroom are of an intensity higher than I imagined possible when I taught college students.

It is on this day when I feel that I do not deserve what I have. I went from being at a job where I was treated as an afterthought to one where my work is valued and recognized. I get a constant sense of appreciation from my students, their parents, my colleagues, and even my superiors. How did I get so lucky? This is why, when people ask me if I want to go back into academia, I just laugh and laugh and say nothing. This is why the old cycle of regret has melted away. This is why I am glad and proud, not sheepish or embarrassed, to call myself a teacher.

Son Of A Teacher

I've written before about my decision to leave academia and become an independent school teacher.  In the past I've written about how it was a hard decision, at least in terms of leaving my career behind, which I had sacrificed a great deal to sustain.  However, there was difficulty on the other end, too.  Being a high school teacher is just about the last thing I ever expected myself to be, and not because I thought myself above it.  My wife is a teacher, my little sister is a teacher (with a blog!), but most importantly, my mother was a teacher.  I knew all too well what I would be getting myself into, and knew that it would be challenging.

Lots of education "reformers" act as if the teaching profession is full of layabouts collecting inflated union salaries, but I knew from experience that stereotype could not be further from the truth.  The profession has an insanely high attrition rate; about half of new teachers leave the profession before their fifth year.  It is a job that requires full mental, emotional,  and sometimes physical commitment.  It is very hard to do right, and is not well paid work.  On top of that, teachers are constantly being vilified, and parents and students feel more entitled than ever to challenge the authority and decisions of teachers.

I saw a lot of this first hand through my mother, who taught about thirty years total.  I saw how giving bad grades to students resulted in angry phone calls from their parents on Sunday afternoons.  On those same Sunday afternoons I would see her grading for hours on end while other people were out having fun or relaxing.  I saw her car egged and a small homemade bomb that (thankfully) didn't detonate put on our front walk.  I saw how people could put years and years and their whole heart and soul into a job, only to be treated as a threat to be tuned out rather than listened to.  I saw how teachers don't get more authority and power in the workplace with age, but often a lot less, unless they join the dark side and become administrators.  I saw how she coached speech and debate teams, sacrificing multiple Saturdays to get up at 4AM to ride a bus full of students to Omaha, for which she was paid a bonus as big as the teacher sponsor of the cheerleading squad.  I heard her tell me about dishonest and borderline illegal acts by her bosses that I can't mention here for liability reasons.  I even saw her in one case be the object of an obscene, verbally abusive rant by a student whose father threatened to sue because his daughter had been taken to detention as a result.  At the end, I saw the criminal lack of gratitude shown by the school for her decades of hard work.

To be honest, growing up I didn't think I could ever be as strong as she was, to endure all of that to get a comparatively small salary in return.  I'm lucky to teach in a much easier environment, with smaller classes, motivated students, and all the resources I need provided.  I hate that people assume that because I have this rarified job that that somehow makes me a better teacher than a public school teacher like my mother.  From what I've seen, it is quite the opposite.  My mother doesn't have an advanced degree, but I could never do what she did.  Our society treats people like her -outspoken experienced teachers who don't put up with anyone's shit- as some kind of obstacle to be overcome, rather than the heroic figures that they truly are.  Some can be proud to be the son of a politician or the son of a banker or the son of a CEO.  I'm proud to be the son of a teacher.

What Teaching High School Students Has Taught Me About College Students

I taught in higher education for almost ten years before becoming a high school teacher: three and a half as a TA, one year as a graduate instructor, two years as a visiting assistant professor, and three years as an assistant professor.  I taught at large state institutions, a flagship Big Ten school in grad school and regional state universities afterward.  While I loved teaching undergraduates, I was often amazed at how students approached their increasingly pricey education with a mix of apathy, contempt, and disengagement.  Many failed classes simply because they could not be bothered to show up or complete their work.  The biggest moment of despair came sometime in the second half of the fall semester, when the once bright-eyed, eager freshmen of the start of the year became just as jaded and cynical as the older students.

While the small, independent school where I teach now is very different from those state institutions, I've found that teaching high school students has given me great insight into the frustrations I once had with undergraduates.  I have learned that on the one hand, universities are expecting too much of many of their students (though not in the classroom, necessarily.)  I have learned that the attitudes that many students have towards college have been fostered well before they showed up.  I have also learned that universities foster an environment that squelches the remaining love of learning that many students have left.

As far as the first point goes, high school students receive a great deal of care.  When they start doing poorly in their classes, their teacher might take them aside, their parents might come in or at least put pressure on their children.  High school students get a lot of attention, and the educational methods used to teach high school students are getting increasingly rigid and structured with the advent of greater standardized testing.  (Gladly this is not an issue at my school.)  These 18 year olds get to college, and they do not know how to function without said structure.  No one is making sure they go to class, and they are free to get blitzed on a Thursday night and blow off their Friday classes and studying.  For students raised with helicopter parents (which is increasingly the case), they have been given unprecedented freedom without any of the tools necessary to use it responsibly.  No wonder failure rates, especially for first year students, are so high.  If colleges want to increase graduation rates, and the quality of education more generally, they are going to have to take a hands on approach with their students.  They show up to school effectively still teenagers, and with current parenting and educational trends, it is ridiculous to expect them to act like responsible adults who can manage on their own.

On the second point, students come into college with a certain understanding of what college is supposed to be for.  From the most elite schools on down, the majority of students view their college education as completely instrumental.  Among the undergraduates I once taught, many didn't even seem to know why they were even there, other than some vague sense that going to college was just what one did after high school.  They and others more highly placed see their schooling simply as a stepping stone to employment.  The college application process, which has become even more arduous and ridiculous in affluent sections of society, reinforces the instrumentality of college education.  In this world the selectivity of a school is an indicator of one's merit and ability.  The point is not to learn something at an elite college, but merely to get accepted.  Everything that comes after showing up on campus is merely icing on the cake.  The idea that a college education exists to make one a better, more rounded person is taken to heart by a minority of incoming students.

Lastly, colleges and universities themselves are to blame for the cynical student attitudes that treat each class as a useless chore/obstacle to be completed with as little work as possible.  Students are often presented with a dizzying array of required courses, courses that students have little interest in, and which they often take in their first year.  The main goal seems less learning than making it through an obstacle course.  Many universities show so little interest in undergraduate education -especially in introductory courses- that the students can obviously see it, and respond accordingly.  Being jammed with 600 people in a giant auditorium while a professor gives an incoherent lecture taking the most obscure angle on a particular course is as sure a sign of the university's contempt for the students as anything else.  I've taught high school students at both public and private schools, and their enthusiasm for learning never fails to hearten me.  Yes, many students approach college in a mercenary way, but most universities do little to suggest an alternate viewpoint.  Those students who see their education as the tool to get a future job often do have a reservoir of interest in learning that gets tapped more often in more personal high schools than in impersonal colleges.  Universities need to focus more intently on their undergraduate population, and to understand that the 18 year olds coming to campus need more guidance and attention, and that if they are treated like cogs in a machine, that's exactly the expectation they will conform themselves to.