Mission Impossible: The Dangers of Working in a School

I know that people often think of East High as a rather bland place, at least from a cultural perspective.  And I suppose that, if a person is limited to strictly visual cues, such a judgment might seem reasonable.  But, hey, I'm a librarian, so you shouldn't be surprised that I'm pulling out the "don't judge a book by its cover" adage here.

After all,  as I consider the nearly 24 years I've spent as a teacher at East, I find myself looking at a surprisingly diverse pool of students who've crossed my path.  And, while I haven't always had a lot in common with those students, like most educators, I've worked darned hard to find a personal connection I could make with each one of them.

Whatever the outsider may think, it is not the subject matter that keeps me teaching.  Nor the curriculum, the standardized testing,  the continual evolutionary tweaks and reinventions of my profession that keep me showing up each day.  Heck, it's not even my peers--whom I love deeply--that keep me at it.

No, it is the students, that rag-tagged bunch of hooligans and geniuses (sometimes one and the same) that pull me out of my warm bed on a cold, dark winter morning. Even--sometimes especially--those with whom I seem to have nothing in common, besides the fact that we are both called "Spartans."

As a teacher, I am expected--mandated, really--to be a Democrat who respects and helps educate Republicans.  A Protestant compassionately connecting with Catholics.  A woman reaching out to young men.  A white person making connections to brown people.  A middle-class person building relationships with students who call the City Mission "home." 

The great balancing act of being a teacher is to somehow find a way to be both authentic to who I am and also remain distant from the parts of myself that might close me off from others.  My classroom should not be a forum for my personal agendas any more than it should be an antiseptic stage of regurgitation for someone else's ideas.

Somewhere between those ranges of experience is what it means to be human--that messy interaction of fact and fiction, love and hate, fear and courage.

It ain't an easy balancing act, folks.  If I were solely focused on the delivery of FDA-approved curriculum and EPA-approved testing measures, it still wouldn't be an easy schtick.  Throw in the desire to figure out how to bring in some humanity, to recognize and respect the myriad secret lives that each of us haul along each morning, and it can be either downright discouraging or incredibly invigorating to do the job each day.  But it's always a bit exhausting.

So maybe you'll understand if I sigh deeply and roll my eyes a bit when I hear the latest vitriol and clucking tongues hissed in my general direction, all in response to the impossible job that faces every educator every single day--building meaningful bridges across a human landscape that is wild and beautiful, varied and complex.

Believe me when I say that no school is as bland--or as scary or as broken or as perfect or as rotten--as the one painted by those who reside outside of it.