Once, when I was in teacher-training school, my class had to read an article about English teachers and writing. This article expressed the belief that such teachers should not pursue their own writing projects, because any time spent on self-centered expression was time taken away from lesson planning and grading, the true purposes of life for any educator. My classmates and I condemned this concept vociferously, both from a personal sanity perspective and from an educational perspective. For how does one teach a process that s/he does not experience? How can adults model a literary life they do not have?
Alas, now that I am a teacher, I understand the article’s perspective, even as I disagree with it. Teaching is a time-consuming job. In the current environment we are asked to do more work with less funding and less time, and the powers that be would rather we think of every moment we are not teaching or preparing to teach as a moment stolen from the kids. Several educational consultants have even suggested that if we do ever go on vacation, we must record the vacation and turn it into a lesson for the kids. Of course the kids deserve the best education I can possibly offer them. But it’s easy to start thinking of myself purely as a work machine, here to revise lessons endlessly and integrate new technologies seamlessly and innovate constantly to improve. The constant admonishments from the media and neoliberal organizations about the dangers of bad teachers ring in my ears every time I sit down with a book, every time I pull out my keyboard, every time I journal rather than grade. (more…)