Coyote Mercury Posts

This post started as a response to a comment posted by Joey in which she asks the following about teaching:

How have you found the experience to be? Affirming, dissatisfying, surprising?

The first question could easily be answered with a snappy ‘all of the above’ but with a decided preference for written response over multiple choice, I found myself wanting to elaborate since the experience of recently leaving and then even more recently coming back has caused me to spend a great deal of time thinking about teaching and jobs in general, which is why this response to a comment became a post.

So, here goes. I left teaching at the end of last school year for a variety of reasons, but recently returned (see this post) to the profession. The experience of teaching is a slightly different thing than the experience of being a teacher. I’ll try to elaborate.

I’ve found the experience of teaching to be a fun, engaging, challenging and worthwhile profession. I’m the sort who needs to like what I do. I have to feel that it’s important in some way. It has to challenge me creatively and intellectually. It can’t be boring. Teaching nicely fills all of these ‘what I want in a job’ requirements. It is, of course, not all poetry projects and great literature. It is hard, exhausting work in often poor conditions with occasionally hostile students. The pay and benefits are, shall we say, below market. It’s a tradeoff.

Having said that, my experiences have varied greatly, each coming with a different degree of satisfaction. I’ve taught undergrads while in grad school (somewhat satisfying), and I’ve taught child stars as a studio teacher on the set of The Big Green (where I learned how easily kids can be spoiled when there are 200 overpaid adults whose jobs hang on the good graces those children). I’ve also taught middle school and high school age kids in regular public schools. I find I’m happiest and most effective at the upper high school level. I can generally be myself, have fun at work, and I continue to learn new things on an almost daily basis. Overall, the experience has been mostly good.

I would say that teaching is definitely affirming. It’s a profession in which you are directly involved in trying to help people grow. You push them, challenge them, correct them, make them laugh, make them angry, make them think. Sometimes it even works and you get to see the light bulbs blink on above their heads. That’s pretty cool. No teacher reaches every student, but most do more good than harm with the majority of their students and even manage to inspire a few. At the end of the year, I usually feel good about things.

Teaching can also be terribly dissatisfying. It’s one of few professions that is also essentially a dead-end job. My first job after graduate school was unloading trucks at a warehouse. Some days that seems very appealing. If you have an unsupportive administration, a school in which the culture revolves around testing or parents who’ve largely abdicated their responsibilities, it can be miserable. I’ve been lucky on most of these counts.

The thing is, though, that the dissatisfying elements are mostly part of the job of being a teacher whereas the affirming aspects are centered on the act of teaching. You have to find a school where the balance between working with kids in the classroom and dealing with all the extraneous stuff leans toward the affirming side of the equation. I left because the balance was shifting too heavily towards dissatisfaction.

What surprised me was how much I missed it. There are other surprises, too: how funny kids are, how much I learn from them, how the kids that you ride and discipline and generally have to be the bad guy with are almost always the ones that show up a year or two later to thank you for being their favorite teacher.

In my current position, I’m surprised by how much my kids – who’ve all been kicked out of regular public schools – want to learn and want to succeed. I’ve never had so many students with such high ambitions. That surprises me.

Mainly I’m surprised at how good it feels to have come back.

In my middle school teaching days, I once taught this fun book called Holes by Louis Sachar. It’s about kids at a camp for “bad boys” who are required to dig holes all day. There seems to be no purpose for the digging except that as Mr. Sir says, it builds character and turns bad boys into good boys. The book is quite good, a sort of Catch-22 for young readers that manages to be both wickedly sarcastic and warmhearted at the same time. Even kids who hate reading will read Holes.

I couldn’t help but think about it the other day when I accompanied some of my students to a local park where they are working on a tree planting project. Most of my students aren’t really “bad kids,” they’re just the round pegs that don’t fit into the square holes of the public school system. They’re smart, curious, friendly, and want nothing more than to succeed and avoid the mistakes they made that landed them where they are. Nevertheless, the first step in planting trees is digging holes.

Initially, they seemed reluctant to really throw themselves into the hole-digging, not for lack of enthusiasm, but out of concern that they would dirty their uniforms and get their boots muddy, which could cause them to fail an inspection and incur the wrath of their drill instructors. We assured them that the drills knew what they were up to and as their holes got deeper (and to avoid being outdone by us teachers), they proceeded to throw themselves into the task. Soon we had a bunch of holes and the kids planted peach and plum trees under the guidance of a master gardener.

For my part, I enjoyed digging the holes (there’s nothing like swinging a pickax to break rock) and to my surprise, so did the kids. One said to me that she liked knowing that her work would help something grow. Another said he liked digging holes because it was tiring and it made him happy to think that a tall tree would someday grow and bear fruit because of something he did.

It was a beautiful day and we all got away from the facility for a few hours to enjoy some time with nature. Fortunately there’s still much planting to do in the coming weeks. I still don’t know if digging holes will turn “bad kids” into “good kids,” but it does give them a chance to feel that they are doing something to make the world a better place. Most of my students need that.

(I also learned from the gardener in charge of the project that the young tree in my backyard will never grow until I make some changes in how it’s staked and mulched.)