#1. The "Aw, that's so cute" attitude.
I think people think elementary school teachers sit around all day singing the abc's and having story time and eating snacks. The truth is very far from that. When you think teacher, don't think Mother Theresa. Think Stalin. We are not puppies and kittens. We are tigers and wolves.
Sure, a good teacher makes it look effortless, but that doesn't mean it's easy. Basically if you're a classroom teacher, you have to bend a small army of (small) people to your will. You must be a dictator, to know exactly what will happen at every moment of the day, to dispense about a thousand instructions a day and to predict what every student's response will be to every thing you say and your possible responses to all their possible reactions. You must have an answer for everything. You must know what to do when a kid rips his pants wide open, when one loses her keys, when they pinch someone or call each other racial slurs or say that they will get beat for bringing home a bad grade, or they can't find their notebook or the notebook has run out of pages...
You must squelch mutinies before they arise and walk the subtle line between benevolent monarch and ruthless gestapo. You must live each day knowing that every move you make, every sound that escapes your lips is being closely monitored and scrutinized by impressionable, yet surprisingly judgmental young minds. You have to make your classroom run with discipline and efficiency, all the while making your subjects believe they have autonomy. They sit when you say sit, they stand when you say stand, they listen when you talk, they march when you say march. (None of this fits with my idealistic, individualized Montessori fantasy about how school SHOULD be. But the education crisis in this country isn't here because things are how they SHOULD be.)
You must be aware of the actions and whereabouts of 29 individuals at any given moment... I like to think it's like being in charge of 29 extremely needy and dependent employees (who are totally and completely id-driven, impulsive, clueless, irresponsible and who don't have the best judgement in general) and make sure they are doing the same thing at the same time and understand what to do and understand what to do if they don't know what to do
#2 The "You must love kids... I don't know how you have the patience."
Fact: many teachers don't love kids. Some love the act of teaching. Some love the ideals of education. Some love their subject matter. Some love immigrants. But I bet almost all would agree that kids can be a pain in the ass. Loving them is not actually a requirement of being a good teacher.
But what bugs me (and others) about this comment is the underlying condescension... Yeah, it takes patience. But if you mean patience like in Family Circus cartoons when someone draws on the wall with crayons, patience like when the baby spits up on your new outfit, patience like reading the same bedtime story over and over again, or counting cheerios for an hour, that's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about the patience that you use to build a civilization or plan a war. I'm talking patience like withstanding torture. Like building the pyramids or being wrongfully imprisoned. Patience like what was behind the Civil Rights movement. Patience to confront waste and disaster and injustice and utter helplessness every day, to look the monster square in the eye and not balk or shy away, even though you know it's not going anywhere. Patience like getting up Everest or Kilimanjaro.
It's true, people who go into teaching tend to do so with compassion, with some respect for human beings and what they are capable of. At least I hope most of them do. It's true we take on a nurturing role, we deal with tears and hurt feelings and all that crap. But you can't be soft. You're not necessarily comforting crying kids. You're dealing with them. Dealing with them in the context of a bunch of other needy kids who need to be kept occupied at all times, and a long list of impossible things you're expected to get done this year, and the never-ending power struggle of teacher versus entropy.
Sometimes that means letting the precious tearful child cry, or telling them to suck it up and pull it together, or ignoring them altogether. Being a teacher is different from being a parent or an uncle or a kind friend... You need to calculate your decisions based on the needs of the class, sharpen your knife on the rough edge of always having to be the boss (willingly or not). You need to be right even when you are wrong. And you must defer to the perpetual and unmerciful drive of curriculum and standards and limited time.
If you let your heart bleed it will quickly be bled dry.
#3 cause of teacher vitriol: "You're so lucky to have summer vacations!"
To which I say, we earn that shit. It's not about luck. If you calculate the hours of actual "work" we do - which is, for most teachers I know, the second you walk in to the second you walk out, plus some extra work you take home, I'd wager against an office worker any day... We schedule in our bathroom breaks at the beginning of the day... (Better go now, I won't have another chance until 1pm!) No coffee break, no facebook, no surfing the web, no extended lunches or water cooler conversations. We are on stage, front and center, every scene of every act of every show. And if you want to see 45 minutes stretched to maximum capacity, come watch me on my prep. We battle anarchy and we battle hard, and we reserve the right to bask in our hard-won vacation time.
Tune in tomorrow for tales of teachers who *don't* actually work that hard, but whose jobs are steadfastly secured by seniority.
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