Bad Teachers Aren't the Only Form of Kryptonite Mr. Guggenheim

Some days my job freaks me out so much.

Today was one of those days. Today, I missed the jobs I worked in college and high school when I was in charge of tidying the t-shirt table, ringing up people for their pizza and beer, or baking a tray of Cinnamon Crunch bagels for 8 minutes in the walk-in oven. Sure, there were consequences if I screwed up. People would struggle to find a medium V-neck t-shirt, or they were shorted a nickel or two, or they didn’t get to eat their favorite specialty bagel for breakfast. But none of these consequences were life altering. And my job was as secure as my performance so there was the possibility of getting canned, but my success rate was almost always in my own hands; I was solely responsible for myself and I took that responsibility very seriously.

My job isn’t so simple anymore. Today, 84 teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 directly depended on me for 90 minutes of their day, and 270 minutes of mine. And today, my students made me feel incredibly responsible for all of them and I came home overwhelmed, in tears, and frustrated…for the first time in months. I’m not complaining about my students; for the most part they are wonderful, eager, and receptive, and there are many days that I come home energized and unaware that I just spent the last 9 hours at work because it didn’t feel like work at all. I believe in the purpose and value of my job. But when I really sit back and think about what I am responsible for, the education of 84 people on a daily basis, it freaks me out in a can’t sleep way.

Teaching gives me so much power and the more literature I read and the more history I study, the more I start to fear power. I always tell my students, “with great power, comes great responsibility.” (I say this so much that my students roll their eyes after the first three words and finish the statement for me). When I sit back and think about the power that teaching gives me, the responsibility that comes along with it makes me so nervous that I feel sick. So, it doesn’t help that I finally broke down this weekend and watched Waiting for Superman, a documentary that discusses some of the issues in America’s public schools. Davis Guggenheim, the director, points a heavy and emphatic finger in the direction of bad teachers and their tenure protected methods. Guggenheim holds bad teachers (and he does a good job articulating that there are good and bad teachers) entirely responsible for the problems in America’s schools. If bad teachers are truly as responsible as Guggenheim says they are, then teachers have a lot more power than I want to admit. (However, I (borderline violently) disagree with one of Guggenheim’s beliefs that he shows through a cartoon in the movie where an effective teacher is opening the lids of her students’ brains and pouring the information in. He is giving teachers absolute autonomy of the content which makes the students passive receptacles of information, completely bypassing the important existence of their prior knowledge and the imperative social aspect of all great learning environments). After watching this documentary, I was even more freaked out about my career.

So Waiting for Superman had me a little shaken up today. I actually woke up an hour earlier than usual without an alarm. Suddenly, I felt more responsible than ever and I got up and graded a set of papers that I didn’t get to this weekend. And it wasn’t like I was lazy this weekend. I graded for about five hours Sunday afternoon, but I still wasn’t done. (Please know I’m not saying this to propel myself into educator martyrdom because I know if there is one thing that teachers are good at besides having a meeting to discuss a meeting, it’s complaining about teaching…I just want to point out that I had already been responsible for my students for a good portion of my weekend…yet I still didn’t feel like I had done everything I needed to do to be completely responsible…because truthfully with teaching, there is ALWAYS something else you can be doing…but you’ll burn out within a year or two if you don't draw a line). So when I got to work, I was still feeling the extra gravity of my job and I even felt like my teaching was a bit frantic today. “They have to learn, they have to learn. This is soooo important. If I don’t inspire them today, I’m not living up to my responsibility, I’m abusing my power, I’m not an effective teacher. Michelle Rhee is going to come into my classroom and rip my license up in front of my students.” So when some of my students came in this morning and confessed that they “left their paper in the printer,” or “forgot to read the chapter,” I became bitter and resentful because of their irresponsibility. No matter what conclusions Guggenheim came to in Waiting For Superman, it is not all the fault of bad teachers.

How can you make a documentary about education and not discuss the culture of the home? I understand that some students have no positive adult role models in life, so they look to their teachers to fulfill that need, but teachers only have these students for 6 months to a year of their lives. Even if teachers are a positive influence, they can’t always win against a bad home life or 14-17 years or prior emotional or physical abuse. And when I have students that only show up once every ten days so they aren’t removed from the role, how can I be held responsible for them? When I have students that throw away every single paper that I give them as soon as they leave my class, how can I be responsible for them? When most of my students were born, I was only 11 years old; I couldn’t exactly be there for them to encourage and guide them through grades K-8. And then they show up in my English II class 16 years later, reading on a 4th grade level and I’m supposed to teach them how to write an effective cause and effect or definition essay in 5 weeks so they can compete on a mandatory state level writing test for funding. Then my effectiveness as a teacher is determined by those scores because after all, those students were my responsibility (for a whole 25 days). If educating teenagers was as easy as Guggenheim makes it look in his grossly oversimplified cartoon , where effective teachers just open up their students’ brains and pour the knowledge in, then our schools wouldn’t be in the news because there wouldn’t be any problems.

I’m not trying to sound pessimistic and I’m definitely not trying to shirk my responsibilities. I take my job and the crazy amount of responsibility that comes with it so seriously. I understand how much influence I have over my students, how responsible I am for setting the tone of the class, and I definitely understand (and fear) the power that comes with the ability to encourage and inspire. But I also understand that I am not allowed to make decisions for my students that are in their best interest, (raising a 16 year old's reading and writing level from the fourth grade seems more pressing than the writing test) and it’s not because I’m a bad teacher. (I’m not denying the existence of bad teachers; I know they exist, and are fortunately outnumbered by good teachers, but I also know they cannot become the scapegoat for our failing schools. They are a part of the problem, but they are not the root of the problem as Guggenheim claims). Good and bad teachers alike aren’t allowed to act in their students’ best interest on a daily basis because of state and federal mandates, budget crises, unsupportive and antagonist parents, testing, a broken system that has moved all accountability from the student to the teacher, a heightened sense of entitlement amongst students, a fixed mindset, the unrealistic demands of mercenary unions, the ironic and incredibly damaging idea that any criticism hurts a student’s sense of self-worth, and most importantly, by a society as a whole that doesn’t value education as much as it does entertainment (and we’re so surprised that our students stayed up all night on youtube or playing Black Ops)?

An education is one of the hardest things to take from someone which makes it one of the cruelest things to keep from someone. In our country right now, it seems like we are denying so many children the power and freedom of a sound education (all in the name of raising standards, leaving no child behind, and racing to the top). Despite all my issues with Waiting for Superman, I do agree with Guggenheim on the most important point: our schools need some serious help. And no matter how frustrating a single day in a public school room can be, holistically I’m excited (and petrified) and privileged to be a part of educational reform every day.