Teach Your Heart Out

If you are doing it right, teaching is a work of heart. It sounds like something that would be put on a mug and given to you for teacher appreciation day, and maybe it has been. It just occurs to me as this school year draws to a close that teaching has become a very obtuse profession. What used to be a job with a clear focus is now clear as mud. I have been doing this job for 17 years. I remember when I knew my objective. It was to connect with kids, to make them have a dream, and believe that it could come to pass if they worked hard and chased it down. It was to teach them some math skills along the way, but mostly, to feed their souls. To feed their self esteems, and their imaginations, and their self confidence, and to be a safe person in their lives. The side effect of all of that was that they were not afraid to make mistakes, and in making mistakes, we learn. So, they learned as a byproduct of everything else that we did together. It was a beautiful, simple, easy circle. My principal came by my room to visit. I mean, actually just to visit. In the process, he or she sometimes saw a student they would talk to me about, or a practice they had some ideas for how to improve. Sometimes they saw something I was doing great, and they would share it with other teachers. It was very authentic.

Things are different now. Now administrators come with Ipads, a very scheduled amount of times, and their visits can be intimidating. Now they are looking for things I am doing right or wrong very purposefully, and it feels forced and awkward. The system sees kids as the conduits for information to go into, and then flow out of in the form of test scores. And test scores are why we teach. It's all about data. What we used to value as the "hidden curriculum" is now seen as off task teaching time. We must teach these "data processors" from bell to bell, and the "Ipad watchers" could come by at any time, and better not see you off task. Ugh! The stress. And so we do it. We are teachers, and thus we are rule followers. We do what they say, and a little bit of us dies a little bit every day. We dream of other professions. We work for summers. We feel betrayed by the system that we have dedicated our lives to. We hope and pray that our children do not become teachers.

But children are. Some children that were in our classes back in the good old days. They are now entering our beautiful profession, and I feel like I still need to teach them. To the new teachers of the world, I say this. Teaching is still about connecting with kids. About caring, and sharing, and making them feel safe and free to be themselves. The data is not reliable. The data for one kid fluctuates so much from test to test that the only thing I am sure of is that it is inconclusive at best. Keep your heart engaged. Do what you do for them, and for their parents who trust you to train them up. Teach them the way you would want your precious children taught, with love and developing a feeling of family and community. Don't worry about the data. Don't worry about where you fall on the rubric, or what your effectiveness level is. In time, this trend in teacher assessment will go the way of all the ones before it. If you are lucky, you will have principals like mine who remember the good old days too. Who are also following rules, but who want you to do right by your kids. Respect them, and pray for them. Above all else, teach your students the way they need to be taught. They all need something different from you, and for some of them, that won't fall on a rubric. Do it anyway! And teach from the heart. If you don't go home crying a time or two hundred because of the burden you feel for their little lives, then you are probably doing something wrong. Get your heart all tangled up in their learning, because that is when you change lives. And, bottom line, changing lives is what you are there for.