Stop Telling Me How To Do My Job
A little rant as I begin another school year
I officially begin my 20th year of teaching, and despite having an incredibly great summer (I’ll write more on that later- I promise), I’m already tired of teaching.
The teaching part, where I work with a group of students and educate them? That’s fun. It’s what I spent 6 years in school for (Bachelor and Master). It’s my job and my passion.
What’s tiring me is all the political push-and-pull from outside our profession. It’s sucking away all my desire to keep trying to make our community better. It’s like saving someone who doesn’t want to be saved.
My school district recently held a regularly scheduled school board meeting. As usual, the public is welcome to come in and listen, or request to speak. Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but COVID-19 has become political. The delta variant has rampaged parts of the USA, and prompted widespread movements to either contain the outbreak or prevent a new one.
Well, this particular meeting ended- began, really- in chaos. A crowd of parents demanding that students not be told to wear masks to start the year packed the board room. They were not wearing masks, of course. When they were told they were violating the policies on social distancing, the crowd showed its displeasure, and basically took over the meeting.
Rather than waiting for the school board president to officially call the meeting to order (which was refused until the crowd followed distancing protocol), the protestors did their own “roll call”- by singing the National Anthem.
After 10 minutes, the school board tabled the meeting, and left to resounding dissatisfaction.
Now, personally, as a teacher, I do agree with parental choice. However, I think there is a large group of parents who feel that “choice” means “anything they agree with”, and anyone engaging in an action to the contrary is violating that choice. In other words, they really desire a mandate to their liking, rather than a choice.
I hate masks. I’ve always hated halloween, and I hate COVID. (I love Star Wars, though.) As a teacher, I do not want to teach in them. They’re uncomfortable, make me harder to understand, and I have the added task to my already diluted job of making sure students comply with the mask mandate.
No, thank you.
But I will absolutely wear them, as I’ve done before, to protect the general public. No, they don’t cure COVID. But they can help curb the spread if enough people agree to use them correctly (I’m lookin at you Mr. Mouth-Diaper Nose-Sticking-Out Guy).
Again, this is to protect the general public, not to make education difficult for a small group of students. If we didn’t adhere to this (which we have to anyway, no matter which way it ultimately goes), we’d be accused of not caring for the health of our students.
To those who oppose the mask mandate, we will be accused of not creating an optimal educational environment. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
We’ve been through this before.
About 10 years ago, there was a push for our state legislation to curb the union rights, and largely the paychecks, of state employees, including — especially — teachers. I’ve written about this before, kind of.
There were large-scale protests. In fact, the state kind of tore apart at the seams. I voiced my displeasure, because, let’s be honest, would you want your union rights, or even worse, your pay reduced? Of course not!
But there were plenty who, for various and understandable reasons, defended the legislation (it ultimately passed, because the Republicans had an overwhelming and now jerrymandered majority). Unfortunately, there was a lot of vitriol directed toward the teachers. I lost quite a few friends during this period of my life due to political differences, and I’m still not okay with that.
The argument was that if we didn’t accept a pay cut, we weren’t really keeping the children’s best interest in mind and we were being selfish. I even heard that from our local dog groomer, who promptly became my ex-local dog groomer, and went out of business.
On the other hand, as I argued, we had to be selfish at some point. Everyone does. The years after this legislation were largely punitive in pay and budget increases. When your raises are limited to the “cost-of-living index”, it’s pretty much a guarantee that you’re not getting a raise. And any good business leader will tell you successful companies are run by happy employees. It’s hard to be happy when you’re barely making ends meet- and it’s even harder to pass that happiness and positive outlook onto your students if you don’t have that for yourself. Yes, we need to pay our teachers well.
We also need to give them the freedom to do their job. As it stands now, teachers are merely line workers, and crowds like those referenced above demand we stick to “conservative values”. We already teach to the test, and have chopped language, music, art classes, and recesses. This is getting beyond tiring.
Yet, we will undoubtedly hear again, like we did over the last few years with “liberal indoctrination”, and last decade with “greedy money-grabbing teachers”, about how we demanded that the masks stay on.
No, we didn’t. Once again, we teachers have no say on this matter. We just simply continue to be the target of the pissed-off public’s blame.
I’m exhausted, and it’s the first day of the school year. This shouldn’t happen.