An Open Letter to First-Year Teachers

An Open Letter to First-Year Teachers (or student teachers, or would-be teachers, or all teachers, or those concerned with the care and maintenance of teachers):

Dear First-Year Teachers,

It’s February, and you may be starting to feel existentially overwhelmed.  I know I did, when I was in your shoes.  You did your student teaching, you spent what seemed to be an interminable amount of time in courses on theories of education, and now you’ve had your very own classes for about five months.  You may – and I might just be projecting on this one – be feeling the weight of the system, in a way that manifests as a combination of anxiety and a sinking, dread-filled pit in your stomach.

If you are, I don’t blame you.  My sense right now is that our country seems to consider the state of education to be in a state of emergency, and it’s hard not to let that leak into the day-to-day existence of teaching.

It’s particularly difficult when that sense of panic seems to be woven throughout the apparatus being used to assess your worth.  When I re-entered the New York City Department of Education at the beginning of my eighth year of teaching, I was required to attend a workshop on teacher evaluation in the DoE.  The workshop began with the following quote, from Lee Shulman: 

"Teaching is perhaps the most complex, most challenging, and most demanding, subtle, nuanced, and frightening activity that our species has ever invented…The only time a physician could possibly encounter a situation of comparable complexity… would be in the emergency room of a hospital during or after a natural disaster".

Setting aside the fact that this quote is both incorrectly paraphrased and cited, as I have recently learned, this is a horrifying set of words with which to begin one’s teaching career!  I looked around the conference room at the frightened faces of first-year teachers and all I wanted to do was seize you by the hands and say, “You’re going to be okay.  That is not what teaching is.”

A week or so later, Frank Bruni wrote a column in the New York Times bemoaning the nation’s teacher shortage.  As you’ve probably heard, enrollment in teaching programs is down significantly – 50% inCalifornia, for example.  I’ll refrain from going into the statistics in depth, partly because you can find them easily by googling “teacher shortage” and partly because I’m sure you’ve heard all of them before.

Do you think this might have something to do with the fact that we introduce evaluation to teachers by calling the profession “frightening” and comparing it to an ER during a major traumatic event?

And now that you’re five months into your first year, you’re starting to realize the momentousness of “fixing public education”:  the sagging, heavy, inevitable load of poverty and systemic injustice that seems intent upon crushing your students and your hope.

So here is my message for you, and please don’t take it the wrong way:  the public education system in this country has been a clusterfuck for at least the past 70 years.  It’s not that we’re not in a state of emergency, it’s that it’s not a new state of emergency.  And you know, it's great that our whole society is now worried about the inequities of which teachers have always been aware.  That said:  you, single teacher, are not going to be able to “fix” the system.  You’re also not going to be able to break it.  And you are able to make small, meaningful, positive changes in the lives of individual humans.  And that’s what you’ve got to hang on to.

Because, teachers, here is the truth:  teaching is not the most frightening activity that our species has invented, though you may sometimes be frightened.  It is not as complex as the choreography in a post-earthquake hospital, though you may sometimes feel that it is.  It was not even invented by our species; many animals teach their young.

And here is the truth:  you will be exhausted, often.  You will fail almost every day.  Students will not turn in homework and you will look at them quizzically:  “But why didn’t you do the homework?” you’ll ask, “I wrote it on the board and everything!”  There will be weeks when you stagger to and from work with nothing in between; your life will reduce itself to teaching and planning and grading (shout out to my fellow English teachers!) and eating and sleeping, and you will drag yourself out of bed and to the school building and try not to remind yourself that you left the school building only ten hours earlier.  Worse, you will feel the brokenness of the public education system like a clinging, fractured eggshell that rips into everything you once hoped was true about the world. 

Just a heads up:  your non-teacher friends will begin to get bored with the amount of rage you display on behalf of your students.  Get angry anyway.  We are boats against the current, and, to paraphrase Edna St. Vincent Millay, we may understand but we do not accept, and we are not resigned.

Because here is also the truth:  there will be golden moments that will carry you through all of this.  You will plan a unit that sets you afire with passion, and your students will roll their eyes and say “You say every unit is your favorite unit, Ms. Crawford,” and you will say, “But this time it’s true!”  (Your secret:  every unit is your favorite unit.  Do not teach what you cannot love.)

(And that lends itself to another point:  love your students for who they are, and not for who you wish them to be.  The student who hates reading might be a phenomenal basketball player.  The student who drives you to the edge of insanity in English class might be able to paint rings around his peers in art class.  The student who can barely write a sentence might be one of the best human beings you’ll ever meet.  Love them for their strengths.)

Sometimes the golden moment is indefinable – you get a genuine smile from the kid who sits and glares at his desk all day, or the student who declared that they “hate reading” will declare their love for a book you assigned, or you’ll grade an assignment and realize that you’ve actually managed to teach something.  Sometimes, when you are the most tired and downtrodden, you will get an attack-hug from a student who can tell that you’re having a terrible day, or a message on facebook from a student that you taught five years ago, one who you genuinely thought hated your guts.  “I just wanted to tell you that I really loved your class,” it might say, “And I learned a lot.” 

If you take anything away from this, it is this:  hold these moments in the palm of your hand.  Their membranes, though thin, are what will protect you from the broken pieces of the world.  Properly cared for, these moments can feed you for weeks, or months, or years.  Properly tended, they can eclipse the moments of exhaustion and pain and fear.

Do not expect to escape unscathed.  To paraphrase one of the wisest people I know, there is no point to teaching if it is not done with great love, and you cannot love without pain.  This, too, is true.  So we hold our love carefully and tenderly and close, and weather our pain, and treasure them both for what they have to teach us.  Because in the end – and this is the last truth – we are students, too.

Love,

Rebecca