“Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the
chance to work hard at work worth doing.” Theodore Roosevelt
I love teaching. I think that I was born to be a teacher.
Even when I was a little kid, one of my favorite ways to play pretend was
playing “school”—I’d get to be the teacher, and patient, cooperative adults in
my life (usually my dad) would be the student. Before I decided to teach high
school English, I wanted to teach elementary school. I’ve always wanted to do
this.
I’m wrapping up my fifth year teaching. Countless studies
say that if I was going to quit, I would’ve quit by now, which can be an
encouragement in a profession that is often discouraging. Like in all jobs, my
feelings toward my work vacillate.
Sometimes, my job is rewarding and I feel like I’m making a
difference in the lives of at least some of my students. Teenagers can be
finicky and reluctant to communicate their feelings. They also can be confused
about their feelings a lot of the time. Unlike elementary school teachers,
there aren’t a lot of hugs given, pictures drawn, or gifts given to me by my
students. We don’t get a lot of heartfelt letters and speeches about our impact
at the high school level. It’s part of it, and I understand and accept it. I
never communicated to my favorite teachers the special place that they held in
my heart and life. This is one of the many reasons I have grown to hate movies
like Mr. Holland’s Opus, Freedom Writers, and Dead Poets Society. I used to love them—until I had my own
classroom. My expectations for myself
and my students when I first started teaching were colored by the film
industry, and I quickly learned that—like all things—art may imitate life, but
life does not imitate Hollywood’s art. I’ve never gotten a standing ovation
from a classroom full of students. Occasionally, I’ll get a brief heartfelt
email, note, or comment that says I’ve made a difference or have done something
positive. Other times, I’ve drawn inferences from positive changes a student
has made or a success they’ve achieved, and talk myself into believing that I
played a small part in that success. Did I really? I’ll never know.
Often, teaching is discouraging. If you don’t care about
making a difference, teaching is just a paycheck. I never want the job to be
reduced to that for me, because it should be a noble calling, but it’s hard
sometimes. I find myself stuck between a rock and a hard place—when I watch a
student epically fail my class or drop out of school altogether, did I fail in
some way? If I played no part in that failure, then what role do I play in my
students’ successes? It would seem that teachers can’t have it both ways.
Either student failures can be attributed to their teachers just as much as
their successes are, or we don’t play the important role that we like to
believe we play in students’ lives.
If my students’ lives aren’t indicators of my professional
worth, then how can the worth of my work be measured? The monolith that is
standardized testing is so complex that it’s hard to distinguish its value as a
measure. Are my students’ scores a reflection of me? If so, what percentage of
their scores reflect me, and what percentage reflect their abilities, work
ethic, the quality of their morning on testing day, their attitudes toward
testing, and their mental state during testing? Can we parse apart a test score
to determine exactly what it measures? Would those percentages vary based on
test, grade level, or individual? How do we account for tests that contain
errors (as in, the correct answer is B, but on the digital platform used to
grade the test, the correct answer is marked as C)? How do we account for tests
that contain developmentally inappropriate questions? How do we account for
brilliant students who simply do not test well? There is a desire to simplify
the worth of my work to my students’ test scores, but I know that there are too
many moving pieces and unanswered questions.
Does my worth come from my evaluation then? Awards?
Recognition and approval of my colleagues and supervisors? What about student
survey results? Are a handful of classroom observations by my direct supervisor
ranging from 5 to 20 minutes in length the measure of my worth? Is my value
measured by my TEM score (current methodology can be found here: https://www.gadoe.org/School-Improvement/Teacher-and-Leader-Effectiveness/Documents/TEM%20Scoring%20Guide%20and%20Methodology_Final.pdf)?
Successes in all of the above are well and good, but what happens when my test
scores aren’t good? What if my observations and evaluation amount to me being
just average, when I’ve worked hard my entire career to perform at a higher
level? What if I don’t win any awards or get any pats on the back? What about
when the last day of the school year comes and goes, and no student has pulled
me to the side to thank me? What then? Was it just an off year, is the system
broken, should my value come from within, or have I failed? If I failed because
I did not work hard enough, clearly that is my fault. But what is “enough”? What
happens when I worked my hardest and still fail? There are no answers.
“Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the
chance to work hard at work worth doing.” Theodore Roosevelt
There are no answers, only more questions and the temptation
to write them all off and accept teaching as just a paycheck. Is the work worth
doing? Absolutely. Does the combination of a disappointing season, loud “data”-supported
rhetoric about how many teachers fail their students, and pressure to create
increasingly digital classrooms where teachers serve as mere moderators
(glorified babysitters), make it feel sometimes that this worthwhile work could
be done better by someone more talented and dedicated than I am? Sadly, yes.
As I write this, I am 29 weeks pregnant, and preparing to be
on maternity leave for the first few weeks of the next school year. Over a
month before the end of this school year, I’ve already put plans together for
my TBD long-term substitute that outline daily lesson plans and classroom
management strategies—please don’t ooh or ahh and my organization—it’s more of a
reflection of my never-ending efforts to control the uncontrollable. I will
miss pre-planning and the first few weeks of school, which they say are the
most important. I suppose next year I will serve as the guinea pig for how
critical those first few weeks are. God has tried to prepare me for missing
this critical time in the school year: two years ago, I missed the last few
days of school (final exams) because of a family funeral in Louisiana, and this
year, I missed most of pre-planning because I had pneumonia. Even though I know
it’ll be okay because I’ve seen it be okay before, I feel like I can’t be
prepared enough. And I can’t. All I can do is the best I can do, a concept that
I’m not comfortable with. While creating a detailed outline of how to run a
classroom to my (what I think are high) standards, I’ve realized how much hard
work goes into what I do. Many of the tasks and nuances are so internalized at
this point in my career that I don’t realize that I’m doing them on a daily
basis. Hard work, yes. Work worth doing, yes. Am I the right person for that
work? I hope so. Only time (and my TEM score, apparently) will tell.
