#TBT A Good Teacher Is Not Like A Candle

From 2019, and right on time for Teacher Appreciation Week

I just hate this kind of thing.

First of all, is there any other profession that has to put up with this. Substitute "lawyer" or "plumber" or even "doctor" for "teacher" in this meme, and it just sounds dumb. "Nurse," maybe. (Hmm. What do nursing and teaching have in common as professions. Could it be that they're not commonly associated with testosterone?) We don't expect any professionals to consume themselves in order to do their jobs.

Second of all, notice the use of "it." For the simile to really track, "it" should be "she," but as soon as we put it that way, the ickiness of the analogy becomes more obvious. Really? Do parents say, "I expect my child's teacher to consume herself in order to educate my child?"

If we walk into our child's classroom in March and find a teacher who is exhausted, worn down, barely functioning, do we think, "Excellent. This is going just as it should." Do we expect a teacher to somehow become a new, fresh candle every fall and be a burned-out stub every May, or do we expect this self-immolation to occur over the length of the teacher's career? If so, is the expectation that the burned-out husk of a self-consumed teacher should just die promptly after retirement, having been fully self-consumed?

This is a close relative of the hero teacher myth, and it shares the notion that someone becomes a teacher out of some outsized level of nobility and self-sacrifice. And there are all sorts of problems with this baloney.

One is that, of course, someone who is teaching out of noble impulses of heroic self-sacrifice couldn't possibly be worried about making a living wage or having decent benefits. It's people who buy this sort of baloney who get all pearl-clutchy over teachers who want a decent contract, as if the desire to be able to support a family is sullying their noble calling, distracting from their "personal mission." This model becomes an excuse to take and take and take from teachers-- their money, their time, because, hey, you want to give your all to the kids, right?

More importantly, this is the kind of crap that saddles young teachers with a huge pile of guilt. Six years ago I wrote a piece that is still the most-read piece I've ever written. Here's part of what I said:

The hard part of teaching is coming to grips with this:

There is never enough.

There is never enough time. There are never enough resources. There is never enough you.

As a teacher, you can see what a perfect job in your classroom would look like. You know all the assignments you should be giving. You know all the feedback you should be providing your students. You know all the individual crafting that should provide for each individual's instruction. You know all the material you should be covering. You know all the ways in which, when the teachable moment emerges (unannounced as always), you can greet it with a smile and drop everything to make it grow and blossom.

You know all this, but you can also do the math. 110 papers about the view of death in American Romantic writing times 15 minutes to respond with thoughtful written comments equals-- wait! what?! That CAN'T be right! Plus quizzes to assess where we are in the grammar unit in order to design a new remedial unit before we craft the final test on that unit (five minutes each to grade). And that was before Ethel made that comment about Poe that offered us a perfect chance to talk about the gothic influences. And I know that if my students are really going to get good at writing, they should be composing something at least once a week. And if I am going to prepare my students for life in the real world, I need to have one of my own to be credible.

If you are going to take any control of your professional life, you have to make some hard, conscious decisions. What is it that I know I should be doing that I am not going to do?

The blazing candle of self-immolation encourages young teachers to think, "I'm so bad at this. Last night I could have stayed up till three grading papers, but I fell asleep on the couch instead. And I never should have told my husband that I'd go on a day trip with him and the kids this weekend-- that's time I could be getting planning done. Maybe if I go in Monday at 4 AM and get a head start, I can fix this..."

Teachers either grow out of this mode of thinking, or they leave teaching.

This is no way to model being a responsible adult for the children in your classroom (many of whom may know no other adults that aren't family). This is no way to do your job well. This is no way to live your life. Yes, teaching a job that requires you to employ everything you have, everything you know, every tool in your ever-expanding tool box. But it most definitely does not require you to consume yourself-- in fact, it requires you to NOT consume yourself. You exercise and work out and give your sweat and blood to get stronger, not to destroy your physical self. You study and read and discuss and ponder to become smarter and, God willing, wiser, not to break down your mental faculties.

For heaven's sake, don't be a candle. Be, I don't know, a tree. Grow stronger and taller and as you do, provide the shade that helps a garden grow by you. Or be a river that swells and flows and feeds into other waterways. Or be a bird that collects twigs and branches to build a strong, nurturing nest. Or be a sack of cement that becomes a part of a strong foundation, or become a tube of toothpaste, or a diesel engine, or a waffle.

Or you could, you know, be a human. Just a regular human being using the skills and knowledge that you have acquired (and continue to acquire) to help young humans better understand the universe around them and their own best selves and how to be fully human in the world. Do that. Do that while accepting and embracing the limits of your own humanity even as you stretch against them so that you, too, can also grow into your best self while being more fully human in the world-- the whole world and not just the world inside the walls of your classroom.

Do that. Because you are person and not a frickin' candle.