Teachers Are Problem-Solvers

And I think that might be a problem....

A lot of people seem to have just figured this out, but teaching is fucking hard. Especially in this knucklehead-of-a-country, which regards its teachers like an indentured servant class rather than the cultivators of young minds and spirits that they are. Teachers, especially public-school teachers, have always been underpaid and under-resourced. But since the “testing and standards revolution” of the 90s and aughts, we now have to maximize every moment of the school day. Long gone are the days of letting your students make sugar-cube pyramids while you read In Shape magazine at your desk and wait for your pension to kick in. Not that teachers weren’t always working hard. But I had some of those sugar-cube teachers growing up and I haven’t caught sight of one in years.

I don’t know this kid, but I wish I did. He doesn’t care that all he’s learning about ancient Egypt is that they stacked things to make other things.

Facts:

Teachers are troopers. No textbooks, no prep period, no training, no admin support, gotta teach P.E. yourself now, gotta switch classrooms the day before schools starts, gotta learn a new math curriculum, got a new student who doesn’t speak a lick of English, got a student whose only safe place is my classroom, can’t find time to eat lunch, can’t afford to live in this city, can’t go to the bathroom until recess. No problem, it’s fine, we’ll figure it out. We’ll do “more with less,” like an Apartment Therapy article about making a mid-century modern office out of your closet.

Teachers are problem-solvers. Download and print, wake up at 5AM, Google “how to do trauma informed teaching,” ask a friend, play duck duck goose, tell your boyfriend to find some moving boxes, read on the subway, find a Yemeni Arabic dictionary, call Child Protective Services during your lunch hour, save lunch for dinner, get a second job. Prop the door open, put the class snitch in charge, sprint down the hall, and pee so fast that a few drops get on your underwear.

Teachers rally. That’s what we did in March, when our classrooms suddenly invaded our living rooms, which also contained our stressed-out children, and we had almost zero information about what and when and how we were doing anything. This was scary and confusing and overwhelming, but we are no strangers to rallies. At one school I worked at in Los Angeles, teachers were gifted an iPod Mini if they made it past 5 years. This was when getting an iPod Mini was considered a good thing. They didn’t give us the supports we asked for, but they did recognize that we needed a lil’ sumpin’ sumpin’ to return five falls in a row. Every day is a rally for a teacher.

As we stand on the precipice of what will in all likelihood be a whole school year of what my grandma would have called “mishegas,” we are catapulting our trooping, problem-solving, rally-monkey selves into a minefield. At virtual staff meetings, on councils and committees and planning teams, we wield our ability to make something out of nothing, like a gang of geeky Chun-Li’s, spinning-bird-kicking our way out of this mess.

These attributes - Troop! Problem-Solve! Rally! - are essential. But they are also liabilities. The thing about making the best of things, when all you want to do is cry out “THIS IS THE WORST!” is that it is a doozy of a mind-fuck. That is why teachers quit and become real-estate agents, why very few people at my former school ever got that sweet sweet iPod Mini, why they invented the term “vicarious trauma” to explain why some of us were irreparably scarred from watching our students suffer, day in and day out, and not having the power or resources to do diddly squat about it. The mixed message we send ourselves that we can make this work, but also it is a complete sham, is wreaking havoc on our nervous systems.

If we are going to get through this school year, we need to plan for grief. We need to name the inadequacy of what we are doing, every day, while taking our Google Classroom workshops and scheduling our small group times and doing all of those probably helpful, good-to-do things that will be mere drops in the bucket of shit that we are swimming in.

If I were to allow myself to problem-solve, which I don’t think I am, but god it’s hard not to, I would kindly request starting every meeting with a collective, primal scream. It would be helpful for me if everyone’s Zoom backgrounds were either a chart of recent COVID deaths or a picture of a cat running away from an explosion. I think it would be respectful if everyone prefaced suggestions with “this is all an insufficient substitute for real teaching and learning and nothing we will do will have a sizable impact and…..what if we alternated between synchronous and asynchronous classes?” It would be nice if every administrator would instruct their staff to take a big fat Sharpie and draw a line through half of the teaching standards for the year before we start talking about how we’re going to help kids learn the essential ones.

On this podcast, therapist Pauline Boss told me it’s okay to be sad for days at a time right now. DAYS. This is good news, as I seem to be in the middle of several days of crying for “no reason” and staring into space and saying things like “does a bee know it will die once it stings you?” while my husband gently attempts to discuss our kid-swapping schedule for the morning. I went into the woods with the new Taylor Swift album and wasn’t sure I was going to come back out again. I will most likely be hopeful again soon, and start to troop and problem-solve, but the grief will return. And it will only be louder when I face my new crop of students in their squares this fall. I would like to have a number of said “sad days” this semester where I can simply notify my students and colleagues that I am “Gone Grievin’” and will be back as soon as I rewatch the first season of Felicity and take some long-ass showers. I would like to be expected to be upset about 50% of the time, and for the moments when I do troop-on to be considered victories.

Were any other Felicity fans suuuuuper disappointed when they finally went to a Dean & DeLuca’s??

I want to rally. And I will. We always do. And I don’t want us to pretend this is a problem we can solve our way out of. That is too much for my tiny human brain to integrate. Too much to bear for months on end. Let’s agree to suck at our jobs a whole lot, to come up with no viable ideas, to start zero committees for the things that can’t be worked out. Let’s just get through this thing that I would not call teaching, by calling it what it is. And maybe let’s take a page from the days of sugar-cube pyramids and have very, very few expectations of ourselves and our students, It was good enough teaching for then, and it is certainly good enough teaching for now.