What I (Re-)Learned From My 25th Year of Teaching...

That I Should Have Never Forgotten 

(Part 3)

I love to teach, but sometimes I hate my job.

When I am in teaching mode - when I am actually teaching - I am in a happy place. It doesn't really matter what I am teaching, I just genuinely love to teach. I love teaching math, computer applications, science, the Bible, - I love just teaching about life and what I have learned. I love engaging people in conversations that are thought provoking and challenging and I love learning from those kinds of conversations. In fact, I have found that the process of teaching often requires a fair amount of learning. And I love learning.

After four years of college I still hadn't graduated and thought I should decide what to do with my life so I could finish school and move on. I wasn't really in a hurry because, despite some horrific years at Washington State University, I had grown to love learning - I really didn't want school to end. As I was talking about life and my future and my desire to do something meaningful, to a friend who had become my mentor, he made an acute observation. He said, "You should be a teacher. The best teachers are people who love learning and are never done learning. I think that describes you." It would probably be arrogant to say that I am among the best teachers, but I believe my love for learning and my love for sharing what I have learned, has helped to make me a good teacher.

So it would seem I am in the perfect job. I teach for a living, right? Well, not exactly... 

As the years have passed teaching has become less and less about teaching. More and more we are asked to be assessment coordinators and data analysts. We are strategists, consultants and form fillers. We check boxes, jump through hoops, rewrite standards, and meet together to talk about it all and celebrate all the check marks. The union asks us to be letter writers and lobbyists. Experts tell us all to be the same and the politicians tell us all our kids should be the same. Administrators tell us to set goals, but be sure they are the right goals, said in the right way, so we can show the world how great we are for meeting our goals. And all of this really isn't teaching.

I spend too much of my time on my job, checking off boxes, attending meetings, recording and analyzing numbers, administrating assessments, discussing school issues, and having release days to appease someone else's list of achievements. But when I am able to escape all that and apply what I have learned from 25 years of experience and just teach, I love it. I love actually teaching. I hate boxes and hoops and data and giving assessments, but I love to teach. 

This last year I found myself, often, frustrated by my job, but late in the year I was on a roll with quadratic functions in my Algebra class. The kids were tracking with me, laughing at my poor attempts at humor (when 8th graders can laugh in the midst of quadratics, you know you are on a roll), moaning when things got hard (but then digging in anyway) and it hit me - this is the part of my job that keeps me going. This is when I have fun. This is what I am supposed to be doing.

If I could be a teacher who only had to worry about teaching, I would love my job! The rest of the job is not likely going to go away soon, though, so I will deal with it the best I can and simply understand that being a teacher is not just about teaching. And I will try to be careful to explain, that sometimes I hate my job, but I always love teaching!

What I (Re-)Learned From My 25th Year of Teaching...

That I Should Have Never Forgotten 

(Part 2)

My ability to teach is a gift.

I believe God has gifted me with an ability to teach. Sometimes I have difficulty acknowledging this, thinking that it seems like an arrogant thing to say. But it seems more arrogant to say that I have not been given the gift and I have figured out how to do it on my own. Seeing the ability to teach as a gift helps me understand two things:

• First, my ability to teach is not something that I have developed myself out of nothing. I have not willed myself into being a good teacher, it is by God’s grace that I have developed my gift to become a good teacher. If I did not start with the gift of teaching, I would be a horrible teacher because I would be totally dependent on developing a talent that I did not have, which seems almost impossible to do.
• Second, I have been given the gift with the expectation that I will do something good with the gift. Gifts of talents are different than other gifts (like new clothes or flowers or fruitcake), in that there is an expectation to use the gift to glorify God. The gift is not for my pleasure, it is my tool to be used for God’s pleasure. If I choose not to use my gift, than I am dishonoring God. If I refuse to acknowledge the gift that God has given me (which is really a false kind of humility), than I am denying that God has given me a gift and I am insulting God. It is like refusing to open a present, and because I never opened the present I say that I never received it. 

So, I realized (again), this year, that God has given me a gift - the ability to teach. I am not delusional enough to believe that he has made me the best teacher, but I also know he gives good gifts and to say I stink at teaching while acknowledging that I have been given the gift of teaching, would be foolishness. God does not give bad gifts. If I stink at teaching it is because I am doing something wrong that is messing up the good gift that God has given. At times, this year, I have messed up the good gift that God has given me. My problem has been two-fold:

• First, I forgot that my ability to teach is a wonderful gift from God. I never denied it, I just didn’t think about it and it didn’t impact me on a practical level. I depended too much on myself and forgot that it is only by God’s grace that I am any good at this at all. When I depended on myself, I failed to involve God in the very thing that he gave me. When I depended on myself, I never did as well as I should have done, I put more pressure on myself than I needed to, and I started to deny my gift. It is a vicious cycle that causes frustration and bitterness and it is only in remembering that teaching is my gift from God, that I can break out of that cycle.
• Second, I forgot that I have been given the gift to bring him glory - it is not for my glory or for the glory of anyone else. Too often I looked for glory for myself and too often I looked for praises from those in more powerful positions than mine. When I did not receive what I hoped for or sometimes felt I deserved, the cycle of frustration and bitterness would continue. But when I use my gift for god’s glory, the praises of others matters less. If I know I am bringing God glory by how I am using my gift, than the criticism is more bearable and the lack of praise or recognition is inconsequential. 

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.”
Colossians 3:23-24

I have come to understand that I can teach math to middle school students and bring glory to God at the same time, but not if I do not include God in the process and not if I forget that God has given me the gift to teach in the first place. I bring glory to God in my teaching when I understand that teaching is far more than just disseminating facts. I will be a good teacher when my students understand that I care about them, not just their ability to do math. Good teachers care and have compassion and are interested in the humanness of their students. And isn’t that how we bring glory to God, by loving those around us, especially those entrusted to our care; those entrusted to us to teach? I don’t need to teach the Bible to bring God glory (although I can certainly do that too), I just need to love those that he has put in my path. Love can be expressed in many ways, and we have all been given gifts by which we can express love. Some do it with hammer and nails, some do it with music, some do it in conversation, or in knitting, or in baking or in medical care. We are all given gifts through which we express God’s love and bring him glory - mine is in teaching. 

May I not forget my gift in year 26 or any year after. I pray that I will use my gift wisely and that there will never be doubt in my students’ minds that their math teacher cares more about them then their ability to do math. 

What I (Re-)Learned From My 25th Year of Teaching...

That I Should Have Never Forgotten 

(Part 1)

I am a teacher because I care about kids, not because I care about test scores

It seems like such a “no-brainer” but it is amazing how easy it is for teachers to lose sight of why they started teaching. I would be hard-pressed to find a teacher that began their teaching career because they had an overwhelming desire to increase test scores. Almost any teacher (at least any good teacher) will say they got into teaching because they care about kids and they want to have a positive influence on their lives. But in the world in which we live today, kids often blur into numbers and check marks in data tables. We classify kids by test scores and diagnostic assessments. We accumulate data and put points on graphs and draw lines to determine the group where a student belongs. We determine whether students are above certain lines or below, their percentile rankings and the number of standards they are “proficient in.” We analyze our data and beat ourselves up over the students’ lack of performance and agonize over how to move student A above the next line and how to get student B above any line and how to increase the number of students above a seemingly arbitrary “proficient” line. All the while we lose sight of the fact that student A and student B are real people with real challenges and complications and real needs that extend beyond getting above level three on the state assessment. 

At times, I lost sight of all that this year. I don’t know yet how many of my students will pass the state assessment (the politicians’ ultimate measure of my success), but I know in my heart that I was not as successful as I could have been, and it has nothing to do with test results, assessment scores, grades or points on a scatter plot. I did not build the kind of relationships with my students that I always hope for. I don’t believe I was a failure, but I did not achieve the level of success that I expect from myself and that I first aspired to when I began this career. At times I lost sight of what was most important and I allowed the data points to block the humanity of my students. At times I spent too much time worrying about curriculum and grades and not enough time worrying about lives. Sometimes I saw numbers when I should have seen faces. And sometimes I simply lacked the courage to let the needs of the students trump the less important mandates of the state and my district bosses. I focussed too much on checking off boxes and jumping through hoops that caused tunnel vision to the academic “needs” of the students, instead of meeting the genuine needs of my students to be encouraged, to feel safe, to be respected, to be listened to, to know that there is an adult at school that cares about who they are, not just about their performance.

I pray that year 26 will be better. I pray that God will grant me wisdom and courage to be the person I believe I should be, regardless of the cost to me, and that I will always be intent on doing what is truly best for my students. I pray that my students will leave my class, every day and at the end of the year, knowing, without question, that I care about them and have their best interest at heart, regardless of what any numbers might say. I pray that I will not need to re-learn this lesson from year 25!