do teach

My duology lies in ruin.

Doom and elation come in predictable patterns and one can be overcome with the approaching visage of the other. The recent seasons had no idea that the election of a pedophile would have the power to disrupt their celestial pressures, tossing us all through gales strange and unwelcome. Wind, as we know, crosses oceans and continents to chill the bones of sailors on distant seas and they send their pigeons to check for news. When a raven returns carrying the news of sailors lost, the chilled, after checking in with the drowned, want to hear of the reasons we stay on the water. There must be something that keeps us steady. There must be a hope.

The idea of a duology exploring the push and pull of my motivations in academia came in the wake of a local academic conference. Those are usually a drag, but local ones get to be a good time and devolve into heaps of us commiserating between bouts of teachers teaching teachers how they teach. If a problem shared is a problem halved, then such conferences are where problems go to be torn into a veritable Kronos as we all load our plates with decidedly college food and all of those wiggling fractal problems. It feels nice! It does give you hope for the day, reminds you of the community you’re in. One of the best I’ve founds anywhere.

It is either a shame, or a convenient coincidence, that my confidence, my aforementioned hope, in my career was ruined with announcements that came after we had a handy group of small rooms to compare our power over the distant power of those casting us out of our community. The dates are public, the schools host it, where there’s smoke there’s fire, and divided we fall.

People really want to read this essay and I’ve found it more difficult to write than anything recently because of that want. Are people looking to me for their own hope? Are people too afraid to believe me when I say the educational situation is truly dire? Do people want an implied reassurance that I am, in fact, okay? It’s hard for me to make it any more clear: do not teach. Do not teach university, do not teach college, do not teach private, do not teach public, do not teach high school elementary, secondary, primary, Sunday school, seminary, big, small, kindergarten, home school, tutoring, languages, mathematics, martial arts, dance, theatre, writing, how to fix a fucking door frame. do. not. teach. The money is secondary at this point, we all know there is none to be made. The disrespect is documented, we all know there is none offered. The necessity is plain, we all know we need people who will resist my desperate pleas.

If we keep teaching we keep sending the message that we will keep teaching. That there will always be teachers. How do you ensure that your teachers can live a better life? Don’t cross the fucking picket line. The one we can’t even afford to make yet.

But if you are teaching, you must teach, you are tired of ravens and their dark tidings, then I can be your court jester and peer back through the windows of time to give you what used to give me hope. At least for wont of imagining that it should come back one day.

Working any job builds a community of folks that you sneak out the back to smoke with and talk Warhammer and how fucked up taxes are. You swap numbers, send each other memes, get fired and never see each other again. Their number stays in your phone until your daughter calls them to tell them you died and they say, “Aw shit, that little bitch? Damn.” The line clicks dead.

Working at a school builds a community of folks who exist to pressure you, implicitly, into being a teacher you’re proud to be. They give assignments that inspire envy and publish research that inspires jealousy. They have students you could only dream of. Offices decorated with books they’ve read, an impossible stack of them, and art from students who they claim have surpassed them. You want that and instead of going out back to smoke and talk about an insane kill streak in a game you’ve never played, they teach you how they did it. It’s in our nature as teaching really is just bragging about what we’ve figured out about the world. But we do it within a framework to protect our egos from inflation.

And the students, the students! Yea, a lot of them come and go and miss class to sleep or scroll, whatever. Some think they’re smarter than you, some are smarter than you. The average student is a shithead that will only realise it in a bar several years later and then apologise to every teacher they’ve ever heard (or am I the only one?). Every semester has one, two, maybe three, that are, as the James would say, dope as shit. But I still like all of them. I have never learned so much about my own field of study as when I try to teach it to a room temperature collective interest. It’s selfish, but the best things accidentally are. It’s nice to witness a student flounder and then suddenly get their shit together and write something that makes my fingers and toes shake with the anticipation of the second read. “Where the fuck was this the whole time?” I’ll shout. It wasn’t there, they had to learn how to do it.

I think we forget that we do teach knowledge. Skills. We are not usually uncovering things that have always been there. A student is not a mine. We have to give resources and confidence. We have to set them up for failure so that they learn how to do it without dying. I love that process. I love the students I accidentally (or intentionally) radicalise.

And I have to keep up with them.

What kind of hypocrite would I be if I constantly told my students to challenge themselves and read and write just above their limits if I didn’t do it myself? What kind of asshole would I be to tell them to think deeper about their lives if I sat and never stuck my hand in the puddle of my own? You can not be a good teacher and a boring person. I can not be a good teacher and a static person. Selfish, again, but it makes you a better teacher. Selfless. The same thing, really.

Capitalism divorced labour from accomplishment. I’m sure a hearty amount of research would find that folks want to make a difference with the work they put into the world. We don’t get to see such a difference as it usually amounts to a rounding error on the spreadsheet of a billionaire. Sometimes a smile and those are admittedly nice. Teachers can see a measurable difference. Generally speaking, at least.

My favourite is watching a student go from using ChatGPT to using their brain. A modern and novel measure of academic success, but their ideas are always so good. At the risk of inspiring a tangent, we have failed to build student confidence and discipline in such a way that they do value their brains. Teachers haven’t, I’d never blame the most vulnerable for such a catastrophe. The economics of education is largely to blame, which is a capitalist-approved way of saying that billionaires have failed our society.

I’ll put the screaming Marxist aside for a moment more.

That near-measurable change is addictive. Might even give us cancer, who knows, but it feels good. Fuck anything else, a student who can take a risk and submit it for critical evaluation without blinking brings a Rossian joy. Beat that devil out of them and make a happy accident of a human, or some shit. I don’t know, I just wanted everyone to know what I mean when I say “Rossian.”

I don’t beat my students.

There is some genuine hope at the bottom of this box. It’s shivering, cold, and will take more than it will give, but it is vaguely hope-shaped and can probably be fostered to grow into something with trauma capable of giving birth to something informed by trauma but without the nightmares. If in ten years you can become a teacher and laugh at what I have written this year then we have done something right.

If no one can imagine being a teacher in ten years, we are all dead.

Either way we’ll have nothing to worry about. There’s your hope.