School Work

The education of students is a two-way street

Another post on the world of work from “Twilight’s Last Gleaming: Everyday Life in the Late American Empire.” —Jim

In the classroom, there’s no such thing as a blank slate.

In a school, your “customers” are students. This is a little tricky in that there are secondary players—parents and administrators, whose interests both converge and diverge—who directly or indirectly pay you, and thus also need to be taken into account. And colleagues who you can little afford to alienate, whether as a matter of slacking or grandstanding. But if you’re doing your job right, the kids come first.

As is often the case in dealing with a primary constituency, this can be complex. On the one hand, you have a fair amount of power as the adult in the room—often the only adult in the room—who’s making decisions, even dictating the conditions, of a work environment. On the other hand, children have a unique moral claim on you, and there are all kinds of rules, written and unwritten, that can/should/must govern your behavior.

It should also be said that a teacher’s power is never unilateral, not only because you’re answerable to administrators and parents, but also because students always have tools at their disposal to resist your actions, well-intentioned or not. Their resistance can be active, passive, and entirely unknown to you, even when they’re sitting right in front of you. You simply have to take their capacities and preferences into account, to the degree to which you can discern them, and to the degree to which you can reach a substantial number of them simultaneously. It’s these skills more than any other that will lead to a perception of you as a good or bad teacher, not only in the eyes of students, but parents and school officials as well.

As I’m suggesting, there are some structural frictions here. Your job is to get students to perform tasks they otherwise would not, whether or not they’ll ultimately be glad they did. At the same time, you’re also engaged in the work of limiting their demands on you, especially when it comes that essential, but life-sucking, task of grading. One of the great temptations of the profession is to cut an unspoken deal with your students: I won’t push you if don’t push me. These kinds of negotiations can characterize any number of relationships, in the workplace and elsewhere. But there’s something particularly problematic, even corrosive, when you’re doing such bargaining with adolescents. The lessons imparted in a school can be learned all too well and all too durably.

When you’re dealing with kids, you’re dealing with people who are in some sense are pure potential. To be sure, some have more potential than others, but the larger point is that your default setting is one of hope: nothing has failed to work out entirely out for these kids. They may have challenges or setbacks, but it’s almost always possible to imagine a happy outcome of one kind or another. Which you’re often happy to do: it’s often very easy to like your charges, to savor their vitality, their innocence, the decency and generosity that they acquired before they ever entered your classroom and will in many cases retain long after they’ve left. (At the end of the day there’s really very little you can teach a kid, and most of that is a matter of what they choose to see, not what you direct them to do.) In this regard, teaching can be among the most life-affirming of occupations, which is one reason why it so often seems so attractive to people who have been doing other things with their lives and are considering a change of career.

But this does point to another structural friction. They’re almost pure potential, but you’re not. Your mere adult presence at a school is testimony to the conversion of your potential to an outcome, and the more time you spend at a school the more obviously that hourglass empties. Long after we’re kids, we’re still hoping for happy endings of one kind or another for ourselves. This is an uncertain enterprise at best, and it can be hard—punishingly hard—to maintain hope, even equilibrium, when you’re trying to stay afloat in a sea of youthful faces. The longer you stay in a teaching job, the harder it is to leave (your pay goes up while your employability elsewhere goes down). It’s alarmingly easy to imagine yourself a pinched, bitter, and exhausted person, in part because you never have to look very hard to find one among your colleagues, where someone is always having a bad day—or decade.

When I landed in my first position as a high school history teacher, I found myself in what might be termed a competitive situation with my students. I understood, and even reveled, in their potential, especially since it was a school with a lot of high achievers. But I also regarded myself as a high achiever who still nurtured hopes for distinction in the world at large. There were some ways this helped me be a more effective teacher: I projected an energy and confidence that sparked a mirroring ambition in some of my students. Their ability to discern my actual achievements and prospects were necessarily uncertain, though at least some of them were willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, my mere presence at the school suggested I wasn’t “there” yet, if I indeed ever would be. But of course that was true of them, too, and as such I was someone they could relate to. We were fellow travelers who were occupying a short, shared stretch of road together.

Indeed, any teacher who walks into a class for the first time has one crucial advantage working in your favor even with those who are not kindred spirits. Which is that some part of your students will root for you, if for no other reason than that they don’t want to be bored. There’s more to it than that, though: among the deepest longings of an adolescent is to see old people who are reasonably successful in their striving, so that they can imagine becoming reasonably successful strivers themselves, even if they have no intention of ever entering your line of work. They’re instinctive collectors of such scenarios; the more they have, the more confident they’ll be that there are many avenues in which to pursue happiness. They want the world to be that much bigger. That’s really what a good teacher does: enlarge the world, not simply in terms of curricular content, but also in the way that content is conveyed. Enthusiasm matters.

Having said all this, I’ve come to understand that the degree to which I’ve worn my ambitions on my sleeve has also undercut my effectiveness as a teacher—a role whose grooves have been etched ever deeper into my psyche along with those that have been etched into my face. I now see I’ve projected a certain hardness, whether or not I intended to; I’ve reinforced a gap between myself and those who may have had less confidence or certitude than I appeared to. I’ve long taken pride in my speed in providing quick, useful feedback to my students, but there’s an inverse relationship between efficiency and approachability. I tend to elicit respect, not affection. That saddens me, even if I accept that reflects both my choice and who, at the end of the day (or school year) I am, whether I want to be or not.

Of course, with teaching as with so much else, it’s different strokes for different folks. I’ve long marveled about how many different ways there are to be a good teacher, and a healthy school will always boast a diverse array of personalities who appeal to diverse kinds of learners. And there have been students with whom I’ve experienced reciprocated affection. But my pulsating orientation toward the future has carried a price in terms of my ability to connect with people in the present who may be trying to imagine credible futures of their own, and who I might have assisted more effectively were I not so preoccupied with engineering problems of various kinds, like the ballistics of blasting off the moon of Planet Now.

Part of my problem—to a significant extent a gender problem—is that my aspirations have been object-oriented. In general, our society tends to reward (financially and otherwise) those build seemingly stable and durable things rather than service relationships. But the key word in the previous sentence is seemingly: the older you get, the more perishable everything seems. Especially anything that you produce.

And so it is, as I find myself wondering whether the tasks I have always regarded with the least interest—those Sisyphean ones which seem to evaporate the moment they’re completed in a seemingly endless cycle of mindless repetition—in fact constitute work in its most fundamental, meaningful sense. That it’s what you’re doing, and who you’re doing it for, that come closest to the essence of the enterprise. And maybe it’s looking forward to having the memory of rendering such service that provides emotional sustenance that lingers longer than the physical sustenance of the present.

Has the American Dream blinded me to such possibilities? Is the insight toward which I’m painfully stumbling blindingly obvious to others less in the thrall of the myth? I believe so. Would I have been better off had I not allowed myself to fall under its sway? Maybe, though I’m not sure I ever had such power. We travel through space on trajectories and at speeds that remain hard to fathom, much less control. But maybe it’s possible to learn from experience to pilot our vessels more effectively.