Teaching

By far the hardest thing about being a teacher is having your heart be repeatedly broken, day after day, student after student, by the world that we live in.

It happens in many ways. Students are worn down by the inhuman, factory-bell schedule of the school day. They are worn down by racist, culturally unaccommodating or ignorant teaching practices. They are worn down by not receiving any positive reinforcement, praise, or support. They are worn down by not feeling valued, by not feeling smart, by not feeling a sense of belonging; by feeling trapped, hemmed in, unable to express themselves – without autonomy or togetherness, surrounded by others and yet utterly alone, required to go through the dehumanizing motions of American capitalistic logic without any recognition of their existence.

And that’s just school. Outside, the pressures and challenges continue to mount. Students are worn down by the pressures of poverty and racism, manifested daily in thousands of small ways: difficult family situations, lack of food or medical care, unstable housing, frequent microaggressions, immigration cases, unbearable workloads, inhumane jobs with low pay and awful hours; ultimately, the constant, nagging, overwhelming worry around survival, around ensuring that enough money will be made this month to pay for rent and food, around making sure that life continues without any other added difficulties.

What else? Challenges in students’ past, trauma from horrific experiences that they have tried to work through but nevertheless bubbles to the surface, unsummoned, at unexpected moments. Language and cultural difficulties; the constant struggle of attempting to understand a system which operates on its own crazed logic, in its own confused and convoluted ways, for its own self-serving purposes, and with its own strange grammar and language. Reunification with parents or family members. Social pressures. On top of all this, the regular American high school stuff.

For me, the ultimate sadness is in seeing how the American racial-capitalistic class system – both in regular life and in how it is manifested in schools – utterly and completely destroys both adults and children. How can so many ostensibly well-meaning people cause so much harm? How can we be so blind to what we do?

We have built an utterly failed society. We fail to care for those who need care. We have created a system where supporting or looking out for others is seen as a weakness. We are in the process of destroying not only our own systems, societies, and necessary interdependence, but also the entire world we live in. We unwittingly ascribe to and support the power structures that exist, with – for the vast majority of us, especially for White Americans – resistance limited to photo ops and donations.

So what do we do? For me, teaching is a cure for some of this. I feel that I can attempt to engage in healing the world and healing others around me. I can attempt to repair, to educate, to support, and to grow new and beautiful people and ideas.

And, at the same time, the heartbreak is real. There are days of true joy, and there are days when the pain, corruption, and true evil within our system is fully revealed. I see people built up and people worn down; people transformed and people seemingly destroyed.

And what comes next? For me, what’s next is that I will show up to work again tomorrow. I will show up ready once again to try to remake the world anew, a world full of suffering and wonder, of pain as old as the earth and of learning and growth as new as tomorrow’s dew – a world of kaleidoscopic emotions that is heartbreaking and sad and funny and joyous and, above all, riotously and hopefully human. And that – all of that – is why I continue to teach.