I recently wrote about why I love teaching, and why I think my love of teaching benefits my students. I would now like to address how this love of teaching is under attack. I won’t necessarily conjecture why love of teaching is under attack – I simply want to demonstrate that it is.
I love many things about teaching: planning the school year, finding new ways to reach students, framing learning around big questions, choosing the texts we will read together, creating writing exercises and assignments and lessons, and being creative to bring out students’ creativity.
Many, if not most, of the things I love about teaching involve choices I make as a teacher. I have borrowed this idea of both writing and teaching as a series of choices from Scott McCloud’s book Making Comics. McCloud says making comics is a series of choices: choice of Moment, choice of Frame, choice of Image, choice of Word and choice of Flow.
In teaching, I believe there are even more choices: choice of Focus, choice of Flow, choice of Texts, choice of Assignments and Assessments, choice of Methods. Having the autonomy to make these choices used to be called teacher professionalism.
When I began teaching, it was the wild, wild west. I was given a classroom, some textbooks, and basically told to teach them something. It may not have been perfect, but I was a professional, and I built my year from scratch. Doing so made me a better teacher.
But now, now the system wants to undermine all our choices.
Choice of Focus. Now we are supposed to focus not on what we feel students need or what students want to learn. We are supposed to focus on standards and benchmarks decided by a committee – standards that are supposed to absolute holy writ – except for the fact that they change every few years. We are supposed to be “benchmark aligned.” If something isn’t in a benchmark, we aren’t supposed to teach it. Thus, under Common Core, poetry wasn’t encouraged because it wasn’t part of the standards. That’s just one example of things that end up not getting taught because they were overlooked in the writing of standards. I love thinking deeply about what I am going to teach my students. But now we are not supposed to think at all about what we teach. We are, as George Orwell once said, supposed to let others do our thinking for us.
Choice of Flow. I used to freely construct my school year so that ideas about life intertwined with writing skills and reading skills. Everything built on everything else and connected to everything else. I loved planning out the flow to my year. Now we are told what to teach when. Curriculum maps are now detailed enough to tell you what you are supposed to be doing each and every day. It’s practically a script. A map implies you have freedom to travel. They should be called Curriculum Itineraries.
Choice of Texts. I used to choose the very best texts from my literature textbooks. I used to dip into my extensive library of books to make class-sets of short stories, poems, and essays to find just the right text to work on a reading skill or just the right mentor text to show students possibilities for what their writing could be. In the age of the internet, it became even easier to search for and find great texts. I love hunting down just the right text to engage my students. But now we’re told to use only the textbook for the most part, and only the texts that are on the map. If we don’t think our students will find a particular text engaging, tough luck. If it’s not on the map but we want to use it, it’s frowned on.
Choice of Assignments and Assessments. I would design assignments and assessments not to be measurable but to be engaging, to help students love reading and writing more, to help them develop their reading and writing and thinking skills in non-standardized ways that met their individual needs as students. I love inventing new assignments. Now we are expected to use textbook assignments and standardized assessments that are not only easy to cheat on because of the internet, but are also unengaging, impersonal, and designed to be test prep. Students perceive them as busy work.
Choice of Methods. I love discovering and especially creating new ways to teach. It’s one of my passions. I love creating lessons from the ground up. But now we’re supposed to let the textbook plan our lesson for us. We’re supposed to use ready-made PowerPoints and Nearpod. We’re supposed to outsource our lessons to others.
In other words, the system has attempted to take almost everything I love about teaching and ruin it. It has taken our professionalism and turned it into sheer compliance. Even non-curricular parts of the job like relating to students and inspiring them are sullied. It is hard to feel like I can relate to students when I don’t feel engaged with my own work and when students don’t feel engaged with what I’m asking them to do. It’s hard to inspire them when I don’t feel inspired.
Several books I’ve read in recent years have talked about the importance of autonomy. Daniel Pink’s Drive cites research that one of three key elements of intrinsic motivation (something we’re supposed to elicit from our students) is Autonomy. Edward Deci’s Why We Do What We Do explains the need for autonomy for a healthy life. Johann Hari’s Lost Connections has a section about Meaningful Work. He cites evidence that lack of autonomy on the job can lead to depression and even suicide.
I find it telling that Hari’s chapter is titled “Disconnection from Meaningful Work.” When I am autonomous, my job is meaningful in the extreme. When I try to be the teacher the system wants me to be, it is so meaningless that I can’t do it that way for very long.
Because here’s the thing. I have seldom if ever done what the system wants me to do. I have taken the materials handed to me and made them my own – and supplemented them in the extreme. So I still love teaching.
But what has depressed me on and off for years is the fact that the system I work in doesn’t want me to be my best self. District classroom walkthroughs have turned into compliance checks. It doesn’t matter how rigorous and engaging you are being – if you are off the map, you’ve gone rogue.
I’ve read that depression is sometimes just anger without enthusiasm. So maybe I haven’t been depressed. Maybe I’ve just been extremely angry in a low key kind of way for years. Read my comic strips – you may see some of that anger coming out in my humor.
We should want creative, autonomous, thoughtful teachers, not standardized, textbook-dependent drones. I see many comments from retired teachers on my social media pages, and all of them say they are happy to be out of this system. I have yet to see one retired teacher say, “I loved being micromanaged, but I just decided it was time to go.”
Why would you take enthusiastic, creative, passionate, intelligent, well-read teachers who know how to engage kids and who love teaching, and then deliberately take away everything they love about teaching?
Good question.