Contexts. I’m happy to host another guest column. This week a wonderful, very readable, insightful book was published: Todd Shy, Teaching Life: Lessons for Aspiring (and Inspiring) Teachers. You can find out more about it at https://press.avenues.org/ It’s a wise and engaging book by a veteran teacher and administrator who passes on not only some great advice, but, as the following excerpt shows, writes with a rich textured feel about his own life and that of his students and fellow teachers. I hope you’ll consider reading the entire book and that it may also inspire some of you to post your own experiences and reflections as teachers.
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In any classroom, something is always happening. They
keep you on your toes. They keep you fresh. You’ll never
grow old, but the danger is you might have the mind of an
adolescent forever. — Frank McCourt, Teacher Man
Every teacher experiences time in an unsettling way. We
talk about it too. When new students show up in the autumn,
it’s forever the same age parading down the hall, while at the
same time, as they arrive, you’ve aged one more year. It’s a
strange way to register time, as if only you and your
colleagues are handing back years, and the kids inhabit
Neverland. And I’m twenty-five years too late with this
thought, but I would have liked to have taken a picture of
myself on day one of every school year, preferably in the
same spot and in the same pose—and then taken pictures of
every new group of students I received. I’m imagining a kind
of time lapse or flip book of myself ageing, while the students
go on being suspended variations of young adolescence.
I love school for the way community forms around quest.
You’re trying to do something interesting and important and
life forming, and through the trial-and-error of that collective
effort, deep bonds form: between students and faculty,
between students and students, between faculty and faculty.
It’s not sacred exactly because there’s no appeal to something
outside of each other to give the work meaning. But it’s
almost sacred, partly because kids are involved, and the lives
of all kids are poignant with possibility and pain, partly
because every teacher worth her salt gives her heart to the
job. My former colleague Carole, on days when we would
have writing conferences with the entire class, said it felt like
giving a pint of blood to every kid.
I love school for the density of community that can be
created, but I love school too for the way it reveals the
passage of experience to you over and over. What other job
has such a close relationship to—I’m tempted to capitalize
it—time? What other job, outside of religious communities,
feels like it follows a liturgical year? When I think back on my
job in North Carolina, I still see each year pegged by cycling
projects and activities, and I associate them all with weather
and light and mood: the Year 1000 Festival in early October,
when the morning air as we set up had a bite but wasn’t yet
too cold to be out in (the autumn wind occasionally blowing
over tri-folds on our marketplace tables). Then short
documentary films we made about medieval journeys that
connected various cultures around the globe. We’d organize
and do any filming outdoors before Thanksgiving, then we’d
come back and edit and present before the long winter break.
In the middle of that would be Veterans Day, when as a
middle school we invited fifteen or so area veterans and set
them up in rooms for students to rotate through; and
somewhere in there the National Geographic Geography Bee
in front of the whole middle school. To break things up one
year, two teachers dressed as secret service agents brought in
the question booklet in a handcuffed briefcase.
The toughest stretch of any school year is the period
between New Year’s and spring break. Even in North
Carolina, the days were cold, the light was stingy, illnesses got
passed around. And I always got sick at least once every year,
usually then, usually flu. The two worst parts of the job:
Sisyphean grading, and relentless kid germs. I see my students
in that stretch, working on their longest, most demanding
essay of the year. I see one of my best students ever write a
long, elegant essay that ignored the prompt entirely and threw
me into a quandary. (I ended up giving him high praise for
the paper he’d written—then asking him to write another.) I
see parent-conferences and basketball games. I see myself
staying home sick but coming in late in the day to coach the
8th grade boys’ basketball game, then getting questioned by
the head of school for setting a bad example—missing class
but showing up for sports. Coaching with a fever once, I
cursed at a kid for not guarding his man. Absolutely should
have stayed home in bed. At a parent conference once, mid-
winter, my phone rings, and it’s my wife, and I know she
wouldn’t interrupt unless it was an emergency, because she
knows what I am doing that day, so I excuse myself and
answer, and she’s panicking because our two-year-old
daughter has somehow locked herself in her room and is
crying and what should she do? I see thirty-degree days
followed by sixty-degree days, then thirty-degree days again. I
see myself arriving at school in the dark and driving home in
the dark. I see our faculty gathered in a room after school to
get the news about raises for the following year, just before
contracts go out, and people leaving and shaking their heads,
laughing a little (because it is what we expected—cost of
living) and trying to cheer each other on. In world-historical
terms, a colleague used to say, we’re privileged, every one of
us, it’s good work and rewarding. Still, people would go for a
drink after work later to talk about something else, forget
about compensation for an hour. Unless you had a game you
had to coach. Or you were running the game clock for
another coach who had a game. Then maybe you picked up
fast food in a drive-through on the way home at night. Read
to your kids if you made it before their bedtime. Read a little
yourself before yours. Avoided grading if you could. When I
was young, in winter, I used to go outside and start the car
for my mother so the windshield would defrost and the car
class picture. Before dinner, students would hang out there,
and when teachers drifted around talking to them, it was
different. It was like the supervision was over (it wasn’t), and
we enjoyed their company and played little games like this:
who in the class is most like what Ms. White would have been
like in 7th grade? Or Mr. Risko? Or maybe we’d talk about the
year behind us, or 8th grade ahead. Always the same, though,
for us teachers: the kids every time were exactly this age and
exactly in this place, and we knew what to expect, we knew
who they were. We’d seen them before, in other faces. We’d
taught them in the guise of older siblings, older students. And
we kept getting older and gathering on the YMCA porch to
admire the view and confess fatigue and celebrate success and
then wonder, every time, if we might change the trip next
year, just to mix things up, just to keep ourselves fresh. But
we didn’t. And I loved that trip and loved that job. The
predictability, the cycle of time, was strange and vivid and
comforting too. But it was one of the reasons I decided
finally to leave, to try a new challenge, because I wasn’t
convinced comfort was a good enough aim for life.