education vs. teaching

I work with a guy who sums up working in schools this way: there's the line for teaching and there's the line for education.

There's a long line for the education group. It has a higher salary. You get more degrees and feel better about yourself. You actually end up working less. Maybe if you're really good, you right a book and do conferences.

The line for teaching is pretty lacking. It's so lacking we've come up with horrendous programs that put inexperienced, unprepared, doomed for failure novices into the classroom to plug the holes of the failing apart dam that is American public education. No one will stay, (they've quit, been put in the rubber room or have switched to the education line) so we con people into believing they can change the world.

The other issue (why education is a crumbling dam and not say, the Great Wall of China) is that you can be in the teaching line and actually do very little teaching, i.e. work. You can be a teacher and get away with doing practically nothing. It's a very easy job if you don't assign work. It's 8-3pm and you get lots of vacation time. But if you do work, and you assign work, it becomes very difficult very quickly. You assign essays and now you have 100 essays to grade. And no one else has ever assigned your students an essay before so they're horrendous. It's remarkably easy to say, "This is more than one person should have to deal with. This is the kids' fault, their parents' fault, their prior teachers' fault, the school's fault. Let's just get through today."

Or you say. "Wow, they don't know their from there and write an essay as though they're talking on the phone." Except no one talks on the phone anymore, they text, so you actually have a kid write "u" in an essay and you begin to worry about the end of the world. And you get over the sinking feeling that they may never get better because they're starting so low, but you put your head down, and try to teach.

And you end up holding a burial ceremony, complete with a tombstone (ok, a picture of a tombstone you drew on poster paper) and you hum a funeral song (which you tell them is called a dirge), and you say a little eulogy for all the awful words that they have used in their papers and you write these words (such as, big, thing, like and stuff)on the tombstones and offer suggestions for rephrasing these words. And you ask if anyone else would like to share a few words before you cover the coffin, and your students have been laughing at you the whole time because you actually hummed a funeral song (which now they know is called a dirge and they will never forget, even on the SAT) and marched around looking solemn, and plus there's a poster of a tombstone in the room and that's a little weird, but hey, that's teaching.

So you go home, take their essays with you and you start grading. Because teaching, real teaching, is a lot of work. It is not an 8-3 job. Mine is a 7-4 at school job, and a 6-8 at home job, and there's always something else I could be doing. I'm never not thinking about teaching. When my dad used to be quiet at the dinner table and his head was clearly somewhere else, I now know where it was. When you work hard at your job, your head is always there. Mine is. I try to pull it back, for my husband, for my dogs and for myself every once in a while, but even that is hard. My only friends are my teacher friends really. I don't talk to my family a whole lot, although I'm trying to more. It's hard to maintain relationships when your head is elsewhere. So I focus on my husband and my dogs. My life is small and focused.

But my kids know what a dirge is, and if you give me another week, they'll be able to write an essay.