I have just returned from a convention for international teacher visitors on the Fulbright exchange. My role, as an alumnus of the program, was to share insights and experiences about the cultural and professional exchange, to help troubleshoot and soften the landing into American teaching expectations, and suss out and communicate any problems that might be emerging behind the scenes. I was especially excited to see Franky and explore Denver and get pampered by the State Department again. But what happened additionally was unexpected and potentially nutritive, potentially destructive: questions I’ve been asking since my return (questions—when they’re not muttered discontent and grief) have found their resonance and choral echo.
It’s one thing to place one’s self in entirely new contexts and from there observe the ways of the world. In Hungary I was always aware that I was picking up on larger cultural truths but not understanding them fully or defining them well, though my heightened awareness of American systems and beliefs, by contrast, gained clarity; this was why, when U.S. teachers got together in Hungary, we urgently compared notes, sizing up the emerging generalizations about our new home. Are you finding teenagers openly groping each other in public areas and buses? I am too! What’s that about? Are you finding people jumping in front of you in lines or totally pushing you out of the way? Not really: that’s happened to me in cities, but mostly the men I’ve seen hold doors and wait for you to pass; do you get that? Generalizations get a much bigger sample when you place many people—in this case, from different regions of the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic and Hungary—in one room and ask for their cultural comparisons and insights.
When we Americans used to gather last year, we marveled at how much more time we had to live our lives in the school day, at how tightly bound the community of teachers into which we’d each entered, and how many more opportunities there were to know students outside the classroom—traveling together, cooking, celebrating, walking, in some cases even drinking. We were aware that our status as visitors perhaps gave relationships an extra glow, and that our workloads reflected the language barrier that kept us out of meetings, paperwork and supervisory duties. We were aware too, though not as keenly aware as our hosts, that our American paychecks kept us out of the second jobs and private tutoring that took up the afternoons. Nevertheless, we moved and lived in a community where families spent more time, communities celebrated more, teachers played together and had time daily to talk and be human beings in the world with each other, and students could sit on benches with each other and do nothing.
I came back to my job and it slammed me. I returned wanting to write entries in this blog but was too worn.
My first two weeks I arrived every day at 6:30 a.m. and left every day between 5:30 and 6:30. I shared lunch in our 35-minute periods with colleagues because I knew it was important but I also felt the strain of losing those minutes. My day has shortened to ten hours since that time, by sheer force of will, cutting larger and larger swathes of the corners teachers cut, and still—and I apologize for this—I still reward a stack of work by peeing, an act relegated to its own efficiencies and hurry.
This is my sixteenth year teaching. Two of the three courses that I’m teaching this term, I’ve taught before and have extensively planned. And yet.
At our convention, we had four Hungarian teachers, two Czech, and a little less than twenty Scots and Brits. One teacher after another observed how busy students were during the day, and then after the day, in all the sports and activities of the afternoons and weekends; they observed repeatedly how tightly scheduled the day and week; and individually, they related the same thing over and over, thinking every time that her American school was just a sad exception: the staff doesn’t really know each other at my school, they never spend any time with each other, there’s not really a community of teachers at my school, teachers don’t know who I am or even that my partner is gone. In observations related both by cause and effect, and I’ll explain in a moment, international teachers laughed or marveled at how little American schools trusted their students with their own interests or time.
The pace of our schools is relentless. I remember teaching at a sprawling, teeming Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, Massachusetts whose passing periods were three minutes—not in spite of the crowds and length of hallways, but because of them. Kids might be a little late if they’re traveling from another building. But they won’t be loitering. It’s the same engineering concept used in Nazi death camps: keep them running and they won’t rebel, won’t break ranks, won’t ask. What I have already expressed to colleagues at Roosevelt is how efficient our days are. We have worked hard to teach bell to bell, to push students to print papers and confer with us between classes and meet us after school, to move students towards those sports and clubs that will make them feel connected while we make the most of our own professional developments and adult meetings. Despite what people out there seem to believe and maybe in contrast to some of the schools out there (but not to any of the schools described or observed this weekend), our schools are incredibly efficient, with every minute accounted for and necessary. There is at least real pressure for this to be so. And within the school periods, we have become better and better at identifying, developing and assessing specific skills and organizing the hour to achieve them. If we finish our planned lesson three minutes early, we know students can usefully spend time reflecting on what they have learned. But this productive schooling doesn’t stop. Students, as the British teachers observed, live at the schools; and social community among teachers is not the common experience that it seems to be in other countries.
We visited Franky’s school. The visiting American teachers (mentors and administrators of European Fulbright instructors) were especially interested in the free hour both students and teachers have within the 7-period day. Teachers have five classes, one planning period, and one period devoted to tutorials, conferencing and clubs, while students have six classes, with one period unplanned unless they’re ninth graders or have fallen behind and need help. Because this countered what international teachers observed—the relentless pace, the constant supervision of children—we very interested in how it worked. Students drove off campus. Sometimes they came back late. Students hung out outside and in halls as well as the library or lunchroom. Sometimes kids were directed somewhere but didn’t make it. But, the principal said, it was all worth it. Students received interventions and one-on-one relationships and tutoring and downtime; teachers got to know students in more personal ways and more time to breathe and put their arms around the school. Of course, many American visitors said this would never work in my community, and I'm sure they were probably right: this was a largely homogenous, comfortable student body going to school in a big grassy field.
But I also thought about a moment Roosevelt, with not such a dissimilar population, tried to implement an activity period—an hour once every couple of weeks in which students could gather in clubs during the school day: we shut it down because some kids wandered off campus. I thought about the Denver principal saying, But it’s worth it. I thought about how much we do because we don’t trust kids—the short passing periods, the gradual eclipsing of the one student day we’d had at Roosevelt, the tiny half hour lunch. If we just had recesses in high school, I had been thinking the last month or so; and now I think it loudly: a real lunch hour, or ten minute passing periods, or a week or even two weeks in winter devoted to fun projects designed by teachers or students, or a tutorial hour or even half hour—something to give us all time to conference one-on-one or to play—to play!—to break open the day and slow it down, to give my job its humanity back.
I met with all the Fulbright alumni now back in their American jobs. We were all relieved and alarmed to discover that each of us was having a hard return. For each of us, the day is too tightly packed and we are too tightly wound. The job feels all wrong. Now that we have worked in schools where teachers and students are trusted and have time and space to relate to each other in other ways than one, the hours and pressures are oppressive.
Franky and I both sought out the teacher exchange partly because we sought the attitude adjustment: we were driving ourselves in unsustainable ways. What I realized when I was in Hungary and falling in love with my wife again and getting to know my daughters and performing with colleaguges in plays and choruses and dances and sitting on benches with students during passing periods—and I wrote this in an earlier blog—was that my job in Seattle WAS really that big. My job is just very, very big. And when I returned I found this to be true.
We do a lot to serve our students here in America. We can be proud of this, and proud of our earnest and deliberate efforts to improve what we do. But Oh my God it’s airless.
I love my students. I sometimes do a great job too. But maximizing productivity and accountability is no way to run a laboratory for democracy and quality life.
Listening to the international teachers, listening to we who’ve returned to the driving pulse of our American positions, I know our schools and our jobs don’t have to be this way. I know I don’t have to live this way. And knowing it, I can change it—if not one thing, then the other.
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