Steven Singer: I Love Teaching, But…
Teacher and writer Steven Singer contemplates the parts of teaching that he loves, and those he does not. Reposted with permission.
I love teaching.
I love greeting the kids as they come into class every day. I love listening to their stories, making them laugh, giving advice, and calming their fears. I love accepting assignments, helping with problems, and making connections about things we talked about last week.
I don’t love being perpetually exhausted.
I don’t love struggling to keep my eyes open as I drive home every day. I don’t love shuffling through the door, dropping my bag on the floor and collapsing into bed for a few hours before I can even think about cooking dinner. I don’t love the paralysis every tiny decision gives me after making thousands of choices all day long in class. I don’t love missing giant chunks of my family’s life.
I love teaching.
I love inspiring kids to write. I love coming up with creative and interesting journal topics and poetry assignments. I love explaining the far out concepts – hyperbole, alliteration, onomatopoeia. I love jamming to Blackalicious’ “Alphabet Aerobics,” sharing “Whose Line is it Anyway” videos and trying to write paragraphs to the melodies of Miles Davis.
I don’t love having so little planning time.
I don’t love having to fly by the seat of my pants rehashing lessons that were getting stale two years ago but having no time to make them fresh or original. I don’t love trying to fit in as much grading as I can in class, trying to call or email parents on my lunch break. I don’t love having to fill in for missing staff 4 out of 5 days a week, being a glorified security guard in lunch duty, subbing for a teacher who isn’t absent but who has been called into an unnecessary staff meeting for yet another scattershot initiative to fight bogus learning loss.
I don’t love the impossibly high expectations.
I don’t love being praised for being the most important factor in school for student learning but bullied to ignore the importance of out of school factors. I don’t love being blamed for a child’s poverty or home life or the bias of standardized test questions. I don’t love being held responsible for everything by people who don’t listen to me and are, themselves, responsible for nothing.
I love teaching.
I love reading books with my students – both together and separately. I love going to the library and helping them find something suited to their tastes – try a Ray Bradbury classic; maybe a new anime; and when you’re ready, a deep meditation by Toni Morrison. I love reading “The Outsiders” with my classes and experiencing Ponyboy’s story anew every year – feeling the highs, the lows, the losses, the victories. I love seeing the look on children’s faces when the realization dawns that they can no longer honestly say they hate reading, but only that sometimes it’s hard. I love catching them with a book in their bags or the same book on their desks being read over and over again because they love it so much.
I don’t love the low pay.
I don’t love that starting salary for most teachers is just $10,000 above the most generous minimum wage. I don’t love that becoming a teacher often means going into debt so you can earn a four-year degree in education and serve an (often unpaid) internship in the classroom just to make 14 percent less than those from professions that require similar levels of education. I don’t love that our salaries start low and grow even more slowly. I don’t love that many of us need a second or third job just to make ends meet. I don’t love that teachers get crap for having summers off (unpaid) but average 53 hours a week during the school year – making up for any downtime in June, July and August.
I don’t love the lack of autonomy.
I don’t love having to waste time writing formal lesson plans detailing what I hope to do every minute of every day complete with justifications and references to developmentally inappropriate academic standards written by the testing industry and political hacks. I don’t love being told to differentiate student learning but standardize my assessments. And when things go wrong, I don’t love being forced to enact scripted lessons when everything my students do and ask and feel and care about is unscripted.
I don’t love the gaslighting.
I don’t love having my health concerns about Covid-19 ignored as the school board votes to make our buildings mask optional while their children are quietly quarantined in greater numbers. I don’t love explaining to my administrators or principals about how useless standardized tests are and being told that my opinion is wrong. I don’t love how my educated viewpoints based on decades of classroom experience are always silenced by charter school operators, think tank goons and newly minted principals fresh out of prep schools funded by billionaire philanthropists who make money off the standardized testing industry. I don’t love being called a hero if I put my life on the line to keep children safe during a shooting or emergency but vilified if I ask for reforms to make sure it doesn’t happen (again).
I love teaching.
I love conferencing with students every step of the way as they write essays. I love providing whole group instruction, mini-lessons, and even reteaching it all at individual desks when they didn’t catch it the first time. I love watching students’ abilities grow with each passing day, with each line they write, with each assignment they turn in. I love cheerleading, championing and boosting their confidence until they can see their own powers increase.
I don’t love the disrespect – sometimes in the classroom but often outside of it. I don’t love being told I’m not man enough, not woman enough, too black, too brown, not black enough, not brown enough, not bilingual, not poor enough, too poor, too selfish, too selfless, too anything and everything. I don’t love being blamed for all the evils of society while having none of the power to change anything.
I don’t love being used as a political football. I don’t love being scapegoated for the latest scare tactic jargon used to trick people into thinking public education is a failure when it works better than almost any other social program we have and would work even better than it does if we adequately, equitably and sustainably funded it. I don’t love having my work compared to that of teachers in other countries when our public education system teaches everyone and most others are extremely selective about who gets 12 years of schooling. I don’t love having to explain why complaints about per pupil spending in the US are misleading since they’re talking about averages and we don’t spend the money equally – some kids get riches and many get pennies. I don’t love getting hate mail and risking pink slips for teaching honest history or science while politicians foam at the mouth hurling racist dog whistles like “Critical Race Theory.”
I don’t love getting death threats just for doing my job. I don’t love TikTok challenging students to slap a teacher or encouraging nationwide school bomb threats and shootings. I don’t love going to trainings where the police offer advice on how to fight back if there’s a shooter because at that point it’s survival of the fittest in the middle school. I don’t love being in class and all of a sudden everything goes quiet and you hear a strange noise in the distance and wonder if this is the moment you have to make sure the door is locked and get the kids to take up their positions in the dark.
I love teaching.
I do.
I really love teaching.
But all this other stuff makes it hard to keep coming back and doing this thing I love.