Call of Duty

Call of Duty

            Teaching has got to be the most iconic of American professions. Other than the anachronistic Irish Cop walking a beat in New York City, there’s probably no other career less understood or underestimated in popular culture. Just like film noir or Law and Order enthusiasts, who might think they know what it’s like to be a detective, everyone and their grandmother thinks they’ve got the inside scoop on what it’s like to be a teacher. Anyone who has attended public school or watched Little House on the Prairie, thinks they are an expert in education.

            A couple of years ago I was considering retiring from the “noble profession”. At sixty-two years old, I’m getting a bit too old, cranky and impatient with the behaviors of my students and more importantly, their parents. Unfortunately, I didn’t start teaching until I was forty, so I didn’t have enough years in to make my pension worth the paper it’s printed on. When my mother-in-law got wind of my desire to retire, she panicked and sent me some quaint Reader’s Digest articles about teaching. The articles were pedantic and saccharine, an alternate reality not even remotely connected to the 21^st century classroom. The authors of these nostalgic memoirs must have stepped off a movie set where school marms wore buns, lace and calico.

Just tune into any sit-com or Hallmark Special, and you’ll find the caricature of a teacher.  On the dark side, they try to humanize us by turning us into comic buffoons continuously duped by smarty-pants teenage boys.  If teachers are not portrayed as the butt of a joke, they are haloed up in a suit of reverence to the point that it makes you want to gag, although I admit that I will sit through those Hallmark Card commercials with a box of Kleenex.  What really makes me break out into hysterical sobbing though, is the simple acknowledgement that this work is important, that we matter, and that being a teacher is an act of courage that makes a difference in the world. Those kinds of acknowledgements are too far and few between.

Americans have a love/hate relationship with teachers and public schools. On the one hand, we are demonized by politicians and those anti-government, anti-tax, right wing nut wings as being incompetent and entitled by our unions. On the other hand, there is something patronizingly naïve imbedded in the idea that teaching is the “noble profession”.  We’ve all watched those movies where the self-sacrificing teacher wracks up points in heaven through simple deeds – giving a student that new winter coat, slipping extra food into their empty lunch box, spending hours after school teaching the dyslexic kid to read. And for the most part, in spite of the syrupy music and sentimentality, these images are grounded in reality. I’ve been that teacher, and many of my colleagues have been that teacher – giving, kind, and patient. But we can also be pushy bitches if that’s what’s needed to move a kid forward. Sometimes it takes a little tough love to ferry a child into their life. 

What they don’t show you in the movies is that we are overworked, highly stressed, broken-hearted warriors who do battle every day in underfunded, underserved, and broken public schools with limited human resources.  If you ask me, this is not a job that will earn me a special place in heaven. It’s the job from hell! If you are a teacher, you know what I’m talking about. Especially if you are a woman.  How many times have you been asked what do you do for a living?  Perhaps it’s at the doctor’s office, café, or a much-needed respite at the nail salon, while you are correcting papers, plugging in data for that time-consuming cover-your-ass evaluation, or working on report cards, and someone asks what you are doing, or what you do for a living. You smile back and say, “I’m a teacher.”

Inevitably, you get the familiar pat on the head, as though your avocation is some kind of a time-filling hobby, “Oh, that’s nice. You must love it.” 

In these situations, I have to hold myself back from saying, “What – are you crazy?!  When was the last time you stepped foot inside a classroom? 1890?”

            No one in their right mind would go up to a soldier who has been deployed to Afghanistan for the fifth time, and say, “Oh, you must love it.” Yet we teachers get this all the time. It’s not that we don’t love our work. As a whole, teachers are dedicated, thoughtful, and committed to their students. But I bristle whenever I hear the collective audience on Jeopardy say “Aww” when a contestant announces she’s a teacher. It’s as if a kitten just walked across the stage the way people get all gaga and nostalgic.  It doesn’t matter that she’s whipping the butt of the other contestants or has a master’s degree. The mere mentioning of the profession initiates the same response usually reserved for toddlers and puppies.

            I don’t mean to sound persnickety about it. Folks are generally well-meaning when they assume that teaching is a calling.  But I doubt that they associate it with the same “call of duty” set aside for those who serve their country in the military. And yet it is a call of duty. I considered teaching to be my patriotic duty, a profession where I might possibly make a difference. In my most idealistic self, I believed that I was furthering the cause of democracy every time I set foot in that classroom. I didn’t go into it because I particularly like children. They can be mean little shits, but you learn to love them anyway. And any teacher will tell you there are days when the school feels like a war zone. You hear all sorts of analogies to war thrown around a school. For example, teachers don’t generally trust an administrator unless they’ve “been in the trenches”, meaning they are former classroom teachers.  This war zone is clearly stuck in the past – like way back in World War I. Do we even use trenches anymore?

            When I went into teaching, I was fresh out of the protests against nuclear weapons and marching in the peace movement. I was idealistic and smitten with the ideal purpose of public schools, which, according to Thomas Jefferson, were derived to ensure that democracy would prevail through an educated populace.  I took my duty seriously, believing that my job was to teach students how to think and how to be good citizens. Boy was that an uphill battle.

            The American public has a rather schizophrenic relationship with public schools, given all the nostalgia that enshrouds the profession.  While celebrating us in books and movies, you also have an angry mob of right-wing politicians who want nothing more than to do away with the whole system, and the nuisance of taxation. Their goal is to privatize schools and get rid of those “nasty, entitled teacher unions”. And what better scapegoat than teachers when it comes to blame for the failing public schools across America? This skewed assumption is obvious when you begin to analyze the school reform movements of the last twenty-five years. Public schools, once the great equalizer for impoverished immigrants, urban and rural poor kids across the country, have become depositories for all the kids whose parents couldn’t get them into charter or magnet schools, or can’t afford to send them to private schools.

The failure of school reform and the movement toward privatization is a travesty for American education. The assumption that schools are filled with dead wood teachers needing to be culled is a great distractor from the real problem – that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Rather than addressing the real issue of poverty, bureaucrats have derived a “gotcha” evaluative system to nail teachers and under-performing schools.  One-size fits all testing and the obsession with data has only served to bog us all down, inevitably dumbing down the populace along the way.

Thanks to high-stakes testing and a data driven model which is even outdated in the corporate world, there has been a mass exodus from public schools. I know of many parents who have sacrificed a second income to home-school their children, because they are unhappy with the regimen of testing and preparing for the test. We have suffered a perverse brain drain, losing our brightest and best students and most creative teachers to other professions.  Who in their right mind, other than an old soldier, would continue working like this? Budgets have been drained away from many schools, to pay the tuition for those who are attending magnet and charter schools. Teachers like I was, are working longer hours than ever, trying to make do with fewer resources.  Sometimes it seems like the only students left are the ones who need lots of help or have severe trauma and emotional problems.  My own darling little school had cut back on the school psychologist, social worker and speech pathologist. The very same school where I once ran a Talented and Gifted program with a schoolwide enrichment component has changed drastically. The buzz and excitement of assemblies, invention conventions, and enrichment clusters has been replaced by dullness and defeatism. Now the school feels unsafe, with students tossing furniture, standing on desks, and no auxiliary staff to come to the rescue.

In a national environment where politicians are unwilling to address school violence and shootings, and public education has been severely undermined, it’s no wonder so many parents and teachers are jumping ship. Given the fact that I was spending at least $100 a month on school supplies, snacks and water for my classroom, I had to throw in the towel myself. Between the workload, behaviors, lack of resources and support, the only thing that was keeping me in the profession was that call of duty.