Who Do You Work For?

I have a challenge for you.

Read this: http://lovemath.teachforus.org/2010/12/09/the-latest-and-greatest/

And then watch as I scooch out on a teensy little limb...

THIS is a teacher. There are school districts out there with teachers complaining about having too many materials cluttering up their room, too many engaging activities in the curriculum to cover, too much time and work is required to choose books for kids based on their orthographic development or the strategy they need to practice. And this teacher just wants copy paper! I want my kid in that guy's class!

I saw Waiting for Superman in October. I went by myself because I wasn't sure what my reaction would be. I didn't know if I'd be angry or crying or feel like I was being asked to buy a $1500 vacuum cleaner, and I wanted to keep an open mind. I purposefully didn't read anything about it. No spoiler alert necessary, BUT if you haven't seen it, GO SEE IT!

So I left the movie intently bothered, like when my back won't pop and it's completely uncomfortable. I cried. A lot. And then I got mad. I felt this sense of complete panic. My reasons for panicking were two-fold: my inner momma-bear panicked for the futures of my kids in a public school system that is too big to be as effective as it would like to think it is, and I felt horribly responsible for everyone else's kids. Granted, I don't even teach in a classroom any more, but I was completely incensed that the concepts of apathy and teacher could go in the same conversation.

DISCLAIMER! I know there are amazing teachers out there! There are millions of them! I have worked with them. My kids have had them as teachers, and I thank my lucky stars that I have been able to drop my kids off to the care and nurturing of some of the absolute finest, but it's not always going to be that way. It's just not. For me, it's time to start asking how this is OK.

So I'm going to be asking a lot of questions, and I don't have the answers. Just because I don't have the answers doesn't mean it's OK to quit looking for them. So I'm looking and I'm asking, and I'm not really sure what the answers will be for me, but I am certain of one thing: Kids deserve more from us. I don't care where they live, what they wear, or even how they act because they learned that from an adult too. If we start writing off kids when they are in elementary school, rubber-stamping them as "good kid," "bad kid," "ADHD kid," "doesn't care kid," "smart kid," then we should be ashamed of ourselves. And we do it! Well-meaning teachers do it all the time because they are at the end of their ropes, trying to do 400 million things, check off all of the boxes so they won't get sued or worse, and find the energy to dig deep so they are mentally and emotionally available to teach their students. They are the ones in the trenches, and I can promise you no one is thanking them.

I vividly remember my first year teaching, and I worked my tail off! I don't think I slept the entire first semester. I was awake most nights agonizing over my kids because they had become "my kids." I talked to parents who didn't know how to help their kids catch up, or if they could expect that much from them. I was always reassuring and positive, and I took every single thing they had to say to heart, determined to do something about it--whatever it was. I read everything I could get my hands on, talked to teachers I respected who had been around a while, and I kept mental notes of the the practices I didn't want to incorporate into my own. Looking back, I'm not sure how anyone learned anything, but they did! All of them did, and I'm positive it wasn't because I was the greatest teacher in the world. As a matter of fact, I think I learned more from them than they did from me. I think it was because I would not give up on them or me for that matter.

I'm putting that out there not to toot my own horn because really I could have done a much better job with the craft of teaching. I'm putting it out there to make a really important point: it's a hard job. It'll break your heart one day and send you over the moon the next. I've left my classroom feeling like I'd just gotten the news that my best friend had stage 4 cancer, and I've skipped from the building like I just completed my first jump skydiving! You just never know what's coming, and it takes an insane amount of commitment and a lot of heart to show up every single day, smile on, and prepared to grow the learning experience of 50 or 150 kids that day.

It's a thankless job, and that's not OK either.

Hmmmmm. Now what? Well, my next step was to show up and work my tail off every single day to make something somewhere better for as many kids as I possibly can. And that looks different every single day. I pinned my ticket stub from Waiting for Superman on my wall right next to my computer so I'd never forget who I'm working for. It's not me; it's not one of my 75 bosses. I'm working for kids.

What are you doing?

(I've been rewriting this blog post for just about a week--I'm hopeful someone is still reading...)