I’m not the kind of teacher who chose the profession because of a burning desire to nurture children and spend time with them. I was more interested in curriculum and the opportunity to teach history and science. My calling was born out of an idealistic craving for democracy and a deep desire to make a difference in this world. When I trained student teachers in the environmental program I directed, I always asked them why they chose teaching as a career. I used to secretly roll my eyes when they waxed on about how they love children, wanted the summers off or how they wanted a family and teaching would fit the schedule. Boy were they in for a rude awakening!
It’s not that I don’t like children, but let’s face it, they can be rude and disrespectful, incredibly self-centered and downright mean to their peers – especially those girls. They roll into your classroom on their soccer balls and basketballs with an oversized sense of entitlement and lacking any sense of grit. Not one bootstrap can be found in their closets, by which to pull themselves up, because – well they are used to the adults doing everything for them. We coddle them, enable them, and in effect limit their capacity to be human, to take a risk, make a mistake, and laugh about it.
Although I’m not always fond of my students, I have loved them fiercely. I must admit, that for a teacher like myself who has no children of her own, it’s been a gift to have borrowed so many of other people’s children over the years. I get to practice parenting for six hours a day. A little nurturing, mentoring, guiding, protecting – some of the things I sorely missed in my own childhood (like that protection thing). Yet at the end of the day, I get to send them home tanked up on Tootsie Roles if they had a good day. I don’t have to cook their dinner or truck them all over Hell’s kitchen to soccer games, basketball, and football practice. I don’t have to sit through those painfully slow baseball games, listening to parents gossip about teachers, nor do I have to sit with them to do their homework and try to wrap my head around the damned math program, wondering what the heck the teacher meant by “writing response”. I don’t have to pay the orthodontist or save money to send them to college and marry them off. I don’t have to bear the pain of losing them in a senseless war, or to addiction and worse. I don’t have to experience the terror of giving birth in reverse as I let them go out into the world. They are, after all, not mine.
Yet for little people who do not belong to me, they have occupied most of the space in my heart and soul and taken up megabytes of my brain. From the end of August until the end of June, my students are a constant companion. During the day, I monitor their academic, social and emotional progress; in the evenings I correct and analyze their work and plug in data; at night I have bad dreams about the ones who really worry me; on weekends I fret about their broken homes, their broken families and I pray they will return whole enough to make another go of it on Monday. During vacations and snow days, I wonder if I should talk to the social worker or call DCF. It takes most of the summer to let them go and cleanse my psyche as I prepare ye the way for the next batch.
I don’t think that anyone other than elementary school teachers can possibly understand the toll that “teaching” takes on our health and well-being. We are simply beasts of burden, overtaxed with unfunded mandates and expected to pick up more and more of the slack while public schools and all the social structures that are supposed to support them crumble at our feet. It’s a miracle that a good teacher like myself can squeeze in one or two decent lessons during the day – in between putting out emotional meltdowns, feeding and sometimes clothing our students, spending hundreds of dollars on snacks and school supplies because – well – there’s always a budget freeze.
You want so desperately for them to do well, and to feel whole and smart and at home, you go above and beyond by decorating your room with purple walls and Zen fountains. None of these things will show up in the “data”, or if the parents gang up on you, because you, as a teacher don’t count.
It is natural for me to teach with a social construct, and to try to build a community of learners, because I started out as a psyche major, who had been deeply damaged by public education. But in the end, it neither heals the broken souls of my “children” nor my own broken heart. There is no fix. Certainly nothing that can be accomplished by one teacher. I cry every time I hear Malala Yousafzai’s quote One book, one pen, one teacher can change the world. I so wanted to be that teacher who could make a difference. I so wanted to change the world, but I know in my heart of hearts that it “takes a village to teach a child”, and we teachers are left alone in isolation, expected to be superheroes. We must fend not only for our students but for ourselves, our integrity, and our rights. Our unions are supposed to help fight the good fight, but too often get bogged down in the small stuff. We are drowning. I am the water. I am drowned.
Perhaps had I been able to have my own children, I would not have been so immersed in the lives of my students. Like most of my colleagues, I would have had to leave the building long before my usual 5:30 or 6:00. I would go home to a fullness of being – a family – the pitter-patter of tiny feet, laughter and tears. Instead, I go home to a certain kind of loneliness that comes with the territory of childless couples. Too quiet. Too empty. And therefore, too tempting to worry about my borrowed children.
There’s a lot to worry about. It is appalling to me that the most unworthy, inept and broken people on earth somehow manage to breed like rabbits. They spawn children like salmon, despite their addictions, or their borderline personalities. They milk the system whenever possible and blame the school for their problems. It seems so unfair that someone like myself couldn’t have children, when I could have provided such a well-loved home. Over the years, I’ve had to stand by and watch one tsunami after another bust through the walls of a child’s life, knowing there wasn’t much I could do about it. I tried once or twice to work with the social worker, contemplating “the call” to DCF, but knew it wouldn’t really help. The system does not favor me, as a professional. Instead, it favors keeping families together no matter how much they screw up.
And there you have it. That little pocket of resentment which I try to ignore. The one which is sewn up tight by the manufacturer so that you can’t quite get your finger in it to dig at whatever is pulling on your heart. I think it has something to do with how borrowing other people’s children isn’t enough – especially when the parents seem to be doing such a terrible job. I look at those families, like that heroin mom and the dad in jail, and ask why them? Why do they get to have a child to love, when they are so messed up, they can’t feed and clothe him properly – while I sup on their leftover rations, borrowed children meted out for a short time and then put aside. I guess the answer is just that. I get to put them aside, out of sight and out of mind once the school year is over.
I’m not sure I would have been a great parent. I’m not sure I could have withstood the oppression and the stress while trying to manage a teaching career, which is more than enough stress in and of itself. And I’m not sure I would have been happy giving up my music and writing, my creative expressions. I think the Universe had and still does have something else in mind for me. And just as my friends are now experiencing an empty nest, letting go of their children as they fly away into the world, I must set my borrowed children free. They are no longer mine to fret over, nurture or mentor. I’ve been thinking about retiring from teaching and picking up the things I’ve had to set aside during a long and exhausting career. I don’t think I need to borrow other people’s children anymore, which is why I have grown wings. ccent 6;\lsd