A Work of Heart

I have been thinking a lot about the situation our teachers are facing in Oklahoma. I have read just about every opinion piece circulating, mostly for the strike, but some against. I have rattled words and words and words around in my head, asking myself if I have even one bit of new perspective to add to an already thoroughly dissected issue. I'm not really sure, but I'm going to try.

I taught in public schools for nine years. My first couple of years were fine, but things quickly changed to not fine at all. Nine years is but a fraction of the time many of my friends have taught, but nine years was enough for me. For my tenth year, I left to teach at a private school. I love teaching. I love watching kids learn, and I love when they surprise themselves with what they are capable of doing and creating. I love connecting with them, and I love knowing at the end of the year that I may have made some small difference in even one life. I still struggle with feeling a bit like a traitor, leaving my teammates behind. But I am still teaching, only now without all of the things I didn't love.

You see, I didn't love being told exactly what to teach and when to teach it, regardless of whether or not my students had grasped a concept and were ready to move on. I didn't love when a very high-ranking administrator told me that I was NOT to teach writing (or really anything but reading and math), because it was not on the state tests. I didn't love going behind that administrator's back and teaching it anyway, because it was what was best for the kids, but knowing that I very well could be answering for it later. I didn't love teaching to the test because my school would be judged by the performances of students who had a parent arrested the week of testing, or had been told that their parents were splitting up that same month, or a host of other things I saw happen come April. Funnily enough, kids don't care very much about a test when their lives are falling apart around them. I didn't love spending so much time focused on getting the low students to pass the test that I had no time to challenge the ones that were above the cut-off scores. I went home many nights thinking that another day had gone by that I had failed to connect with those kids that rested solidly in the middle, and that ate away at me. I didn't love hearing that I "only taught 10 months out of the year" so my pay was actually more than fair, even though when I worked out my hourly wage with all the extra hours I put in, it was somewhere around $13 an hour (which wasn't too far from what I made working retail in college). I mean, we pay our high school babysitters $10 an hour to play with our one kiddo! I didn't love spending so much of my money on supplies and things for my classroom, but it didn't occur to me that things should be any other way, because I had seen my parents (who were also teachers) do it for many years before I ever did; their careers offered just a glimpse into the unseen sacrifices I would be expected to make as a teacher. I didn't love when the copy count for our classrooms started to be limited; when people who had never seen us teach started questioning how much we chose to copy (and by extension questioning our professional judgement) through an inanimate object. And I didn't love when the standards kept changing and changing and changing and we were forced to spend many long hours of our own time trying to bend and revamp our curriculum in order to push our kids to learn things that seemed to be more developmentally inappropriate by the year. The list could go on and on, but that's not really the point. 

The point is that many, many of my friends are doing their jobs, and doing them extremely well, despite all of these things, and so many more things that lawmakers have never thought about for a second. My friends have taken on more and more every year, and they have done it under the radar, with such little recognition and respect that it still shocks me sometimes, now that I'm on the outside looking in. Were I still part of the public school system, I would walk in a heartbeat, not because I didn't care about my students, but because I absolutely did. Trust me when I say that if your child is being taught by someone who is still sticking it out despite professionally deplorable conditions in many cases, it is ONLY because they love their kids, your kids. It is definitely not about the money. According to the opposition, that's what getting a second job is for...