Stress vs Passion
When we work hard for something we don't believe in, it's called stress. When we work hard for something we love, it's called passion. -Simon Sinek
Dear Diary,
I know. I know. I’m sorry.
I promised to devote exactly ZERO seconds to thinking about school during break and now I’m contemplating how being excited to teach something is a metaphor for why teachers are broken…but look, we have this brain and this is what it does so like Adele says “Go easy on me.”
To be fair, you know how reflective I get while listening to audiobooks during long runs, so we both knew this was coming.
I really want to read this book with my 11thgrade American Literature kids next year. But trying to get that to happen brings with it a promise of exhaustion that seems too overwhelming to even digest right now.
See, Diary? This is why we said NO SCHOOL THOUGHTS OVER BREAK.
Yet...
When I was considering teaching this book, I kept flashing back to Ms. Aehl, my 11th grade literature teacher who somehow wrangled Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar into our American Literature curriculum. She taught me so much about how any text can be a vehicle for epiphany and understanding symbolism, and metaphor. She literally hopped around the room with excitement. She taught me to love the hunt for thematic message.
So why not?
Listening to chapter after chapter of Hollow Kingdomby Kira Jane Buxton, I start to fantasize (or maybe I’m disassociating because now I’m mile 8 of this run) about how I could use characterization and metaphor and world building to help my kids piece out the theme-puzzle of this novel. And how funny this book is! How—apart from a few sexually promiscuous squirrels—there’s no objectionable sexual content that would cause an immediate rejection. No real violence. I get giddy over the thought of class discussions and asking why the reluctant hero is so doubley-named.
At dinner with mom, I told her how much I loved it and wanted to teach it. “Could you do that? I mean…it’s a little rough in language, right?” Sure. Language I can fight against. I can (and have) given books to kids with objectionable words blacked out. I know, Diary, I can hear you gasp in horror, but honestly, the kids see through the black Sharpie, so it isn’t that much of a travesty. “Well, she’s an American author; she won a Thurber award for humor…and mom! The HUMOR! That’s what the kids really need right now. Not Of Mice and Men or Into the Wild. They need to remember the joy of discovery in reading!”
Then my heart dropped because I knew it was pointless. This joy I felt about potentially re-igniting kids’ love for learning (which should be easy in a Language Arts class) was going to be crushed. Not from my fellow 11th grade teachers. I knew they were also hungry for something uplifting (and from an American author no less!). They would be on board…but from all the other things.
We would get parent complaints about language. They would also complain that it wasn’t American enough in its message of perseverance. Some would argue about why kids are reading about a crow in the zombie apocalypse who is suffering from an identity crisis. I could hear the uproar of “Why aren’t they reading Old Man and the Sea?! That’s what I read! THAT is American Literature.”
Also the kids themselves. My little enthusiasm train could never compete with Fortnite or TikTok or the immense amount of social isolation they are recovering from. The book was fun and uplifting, sure but who am I to try to out entertain thirty-four 16 year-olds who have constant message streams coming in on their smart watches? An entire social ocean buzzing away in their bookbags.
And they still have to take all those tests. Tests whose scores will reflect just how bad of a teacher I am because they couldn’t evaluate the connotative meaning of half of a sentence in an essay about a speech done by Theodore Roosevelt. If only I hadn’t taken the time to teach that novel about the crow, these students could do so much better on the question about the Ann Bradstreet poem “Upon the Burning of my House.”
And there it is. The epiphany that cracked and exposed the runny hurt of many teachers this year: we thought they would have learned the lesson—and they didn’t.
When schools shut down so quickly that lunches rotted in lockers and teachers scrambled to cobble together concurrent or online or ANY school-type thing—we thought they learned their lesson.
For a moment some of them did. Policy makers called for a halt to testing.
Parents made videos thanking teachers and acknowledging how hard their job is. We rallied together and we all said TOGETHER this is our job: to educate and nurture the upcoming generation. It was the end of the world and we felt, well—not fine—but at least part of a team.
Then 2020 came with its slow drain on our psyches. We scraped through curriculum. We taught into the abyss of faceless computer screen while the nation struggled through crisis after crisis. We worked double-time on engagement and eased back on what we expected.
Teachers thought: Aha! Now they will have learned that grades aren’t the point of learning; learning can be both individual and collective and that no matter how wonderful a teacher I am, if you don’t have enough resources from home—education is not the panacea.
This year, we thought it would be different because we thought they learned how valuable relationship (over rigor) is. That most kids can’t learn from a computer screen. They need the aesthetic experience of a classroom, of discovery, of mistake and recovery and of joy. But the kids are traumatized. The kids are more dependent on the fast dopamine kick of social media and gaming. The kids are further alienated from a curriculum that is ever more detached from hope and humor. The kids are behaving badly and the parents—many of them are behaving worse.
The book I got excited about teaching isn’t messy with American themes.
Those themes could get me in trouble.
I challenge you, Diary, recall a single text that you read in high school that couldn’t potentially get me in trouble today. This book has only one American theme: optimism (literally “the thing with feathers” in this case). No one could charge me of teaching CRT with that, right?
But it won’t matter. I am too tired to put up the fight necessary to bring a novel like this into my class. Even in the best of times I had to write 4 and 5 page rationales for teaching Huck Finn, 12 Angry Men, and even teaching SAT vocabulary in isolation. My every choice as a teacher is questioned, and I am tired. I am tired of defending myself to people who don’t really even know what they want from public education. I am tired of fighting against a society that I thought was on my team—our team—the America-Gets-Through-The-Pandemic-Relatively-Okay Team.
But maybe it was me who needed to learn the lesson. Is this what burn out is?
So instead, here I am, Diary. Writing to you. Letting you know, that once upon a time I taught kids how Descartes and Baudrillard and Emily Dickinson all relate back to Toni Morrison’s Poisonwood Bible, but I don’t have the fight in me anymore. That’s why teachers are broken—because we went into teaching to participate in learning. It was creative. But now? Now we are too tired to be creative. We are too busy gathering data and classroom managing and mitigating our classrooms against political asshattery. We are asking ourselves…if we aren’t able to teach anymore, what exactly is keeping us here? Pay?
Respect?
Stop laughing.
I will shelve (see what I did there?) the idea for now. Maybe I will teach it some day. But I am too tired to fight for other people’s children just now.
I will just write and pine for better times and see where the universe sends me.