It's Saturday night on Thanksgiving weekend. Stephanie had cooked all day and served two kinds of potatoes, two kinds of cranberry sauce, two kinds of apple pie (and a pecan and a pumpkin), stuffing, brussel sprouts, beets and greens, and a fat, glazed turkey. She brought out and polished her grandmother's vased candlesticks and frilled linen napkins and set forth a beautiful meal for our family, for Lauren, Jeff and Maude, for Wendy, and not for my father, who is in the middle of a six week road trip in honor of an award he is receiving at his high school in Miami, and in honor of his new car.
I have time tonight to write. I've fantasized about this writing, because for maybe a month, I've been arriving at -- if not clear then resonating -- thoughts about work. But of course, the time to actually slow down enough to do more than intuit in a glimpse what I might compose hasn't been handy. Which is what I wanted to write about.
I was listening to NPR a few weeks ago, and a professor was talking about the kinds of preparation students are receiving these days to head out into the work world. Middle class parents tell their children, and then teachers and professors tell their high-achieving students, that they should do what they love, or, "do what you love and you will never have to work a day in your life." Find and follow your passion. But even when the job market's good, this advice so often leads to disappointment and self doubt. The truth is that many jobs out there don't enrich the soul. In the radio essay, a professor says that what "he tries to tell his students is that a good job is good enough; they don't need to have the best job." And that seems like good advice. While we're reading Moby Dick with Arthur Schopenhauer in my Philosophy and Literature class, this point seems to repeated: Schopenhauer reiterates the Buddhist noble truth that life is suffering, and that, as soon as people give up on trying to make themselves happy, they can be in tune with the universe, not happy necessarily, but at peace. Ishmael too finds himself grooving on the masthead, forgetting his philosophizing for a moment and just feeling the vastness of the ocean, or he finds himself contented with the small pleasures in squeezing hands in buckets of oil with the other sailors; meanwhile, Ahab is driving himself to thinness and ruin, trying to exert his will on the universe. To let go.To give up on the desire to define and cage passion or happiness, or the career that will answer the internal rumblings, seems wise.
And yet.
I have loved my job for years. So many aspects to my job are joyful. I love the teenage energy, the pride students feel in original thought or carefully crafted words; I love the thoughtfulness adolescents are willing to put into what it means to be a decent human being, or to live a worthy life; I love unbaring the nuances and subtleties of literature, or the overtly reckless fun in Shakespeare; I love shaping the energy and delight of two and a half dozen people, of producing a sense of moment; I love students' discovery of civic potential, and personal strength; I love the pride they feel after numerous revisions that finally get my nod; and I love the intellectual dialogue suddenly in reach, the deliberate sparring I invite; and the students who linger after class or return in spare moments to add a relevant thought. I even love aspects of my job that get outside my classroom, as when I'm collaborating with other teachers with books we're all teaching together, or sparking off their ideas, or lining up ideas for a meaningful new event.
But these things that I love are getting crowded out. It's now been three times this year that I have come home saying I hate my job, something I hadn't ever said in fifteen years of teaching to this point.
Before I left for Hungary, I had often felt the strain of my work. The role of an English teacher is a big one. Universities rightly lay the blame for poor writing and critical reading skills on high school English teachers; nationally, reading and writing are two of the three things that consistently get tested and compared. Like all of my departmental colleagues, I already felt like Animal Farm's Boxer. I will work harder. I read papers like mad and turned them around in a day through clever staggering of assignments, brought in tutors and student teachers for counseling and extra rounds of revision and feedback, and I pushed students to read and annotate more, knowing that my students were working far harder than I ever did at their age. It was a lot of work, but I never came home and started browsing career possibilities as I've done three times this year. It was enough work, though, that I sought the working sabbatical of the Fulbright to buy me some perspective.
As I'd said in the previous blog entry, all of us returning Fulbright teachers have felt the jarring strain of our return. So, does my dissatisfaction stem from this cultural moment, or has the teaching job actually gotten worse? Of course, it's hard to separate the feelings. But I think the job is getting worse.
One piece is just numerical. I have 148 students a day. I haven't had that many students for half a decade. The numbers are threatening to get higher. Despite the systemic pressure on English teachers to deliver on an enormous array of embedded skills under the standardized microscope, because we have the largest department and therefore the most amorphous numbers, we are easy to trim. The biggest departments outside of Music, Theater and PE -- English, Math, and Social Studies -- have the largest class sizes. If I collect one paper every two weeks from every student, and I devote ten minutes to each paper, if I'm doing nothing else, I am also grading papers for 25 hours. But I'm not doing nothing else. I've taught Philosophy before, but you don't just do Moby Dick or Schopenhauer off the cuff. I've never taught the Advanced Placement Language and Composition class, and that takes preparation too. Even after cutting shameful corners, I still take between one and a half to two and a half hours a day to prepare the next day's lessons. And those papers: ten minutes an essay, really? If no parents e-mailed, if no student needed tutoring, and if I had no meetings to attend, then I'm already overwhelmed; but I don't think I hate the job yet.
The last time I hated my job, it was a Monday, and I was collecting papers from one class, quarterly projects from two others, I was biking downtown after school for a department chair meeting that would get me home to my family (and prepping for school) at 7:00 pm, preparing for a two hour meeting I was running the next day, and a two hour meeting I was running the day after that, and two staffings over failing kids after that, and a conference with two parents after that. When a boy wanted to meet with me to discuss his essay, but I had to run to (another) meeting, I realized -- all the heat rising into my chest and head, heat that was to become hatred, as in, I hate my job -- I realized that I couldn't meet with him before school on Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday either, or during lunch or after school on Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday either. And why the fuck not.
The very next week, I did something I've never done in all my years of teaching: I took a personal day off. On that personal day, I graded papers for six hours straight; I wrote a letter of recommendation; I made revisions to the departmental course catalogue; I cashed two checks that'd been sitting on the piano for two months; I went running; I sent out an application for a grant; and I ate lunch with Stephanie. It was like a revelation. I could do this! If my work week wasn't fitting into my week-week, I could call in sick and put a day-day into my work day. I could be in control. I don't want to end this particular story by admitting how quickly I became overwhelmed again the next day.
Time is a problem, and not being able to give it to that kid, for example, contributed, but it was the meetings themselves that made my feelings towards the job especially poisonous. The meeting I had downtown that Monday evening was in part about the Common Core -- national standards most states including Washington have adopted as the future language of targeted skills. Before I left for Hungary, English department chairs spent one or two sub days every month and two or three meetings every month developing our own standards, that would be in line with the Common Core. I wondered at the time why we didn't just accept the new standards wholesale and save a vast amount of time and money, if indeed, our state was soon going to adopt them. But we didn't. Now we are juggling four sets of standards at the secondary level in our department alone: the existing grade level expectations, on their way out, but still the state law of the land; the reading, writing and oral language standards we sloppily created two years ago; the standards we were encouraged to emulate in the College Board Standards for College Success; and the Common Core. If it's confusing, good news: I have another sub day scheduled next week to sort it in a day called Leadership and the Common Core.
The day after that, I have a three hour training after school to look at something called the Danielson Framework. This, like every set of standards, has pages and pages of charts too, but it's not just about English standards: it's about teaching standards, and every teacher in the district is being trained to use such charts to improve our practice, as we must, because the Danielson Framework is going to be attached to the new evaluation system going into effect next year, the performance evaluation system. I can't remember if the performance evaluation is also going to take stock of students' MAP scores (Measures of Academic Progress), a set of charts and an adaptive test students have been taking on the computer now for three years to measure their RIT levels (Rasch Unit); but I did go to my third training last week to understand how RIT scores worked and how to work with them -- but, for the third time, learned only that when scores go up, that's good. In any event, it's possible that the Danielson Framework charts will be benign, although it's another chart in my head: I'll find out even before that three hour training, because, on top of my whole day downtown for Leadership and the Common Core, I also have a whole day downtown this coming Friday for the Danielson Framework, preceding the three hour session the following week.
That's a lot of sub days, and each one means my work week is going to fit even less into my week week; but even more importantly, it means my head and my planning and my interactions with students are going to be crowded with all sorts of things that don't have anything to do with aspects of the job I love. And these things, they don't just compete with such joyous qualities for time in the school day: they crush.
I am going to many meetings and trainings to look at new charts and rubrics and standards, hundreds of pages of them; every faculty meeting goes over some slice of chart; every district meeting goes over some hunk. Thinking about the future of teaching in our district, with its increasing rigor and chartedness and class sizes, reflected in its absolute dry heave of a motto -- "Every student achieving, everyone accountable" -- it's hateful; and it's not just that I had a fabulous, life-bearing time in Hungary last year; it's that my job now is overwhelming and threatens to be ridiculous.
The class sizes are not going to get better any time soon. We know that the district budget is in trouble, and that the state budget is in dire straits. And this is a great opportunity.
A way the district and the state can save money while retaining the strength of its schools? For the duration, stop meddling. Leave us alone. Poke your head in our rooms when there's trouble, but otherwise, state, and you especially, district, no more all day trainings. No more charts. No more high-stakes tests. You can't afford them. You really can't.
I like so well the advice I heard, that "a good job is good enough." I'm willing to settle for a job that has its bad days and its good, its stresses and its small rewards, its unimpressive salary and invisible hours; but I didn't give thanks for it this year. If my work week doesn't fit into my week week, then that's it.
Thankfully, I have time this weekend to write my thoughts and slow down, and more importantly, to spend time with people I love. They're why a good job can be good enough.
