I was just trolling the comments over at TMAO’s own resignation saga and discovered that apparently this whole “I’m-taking-a-break-but-coming-back” line is already a cliché. (I guess he is not planning to return to the kids? I don’t believe it.)
Let me tell you why I am unquestionably coming back.
Four years ago, one of the three good teachers I encountered in my credential program framed TFA perfectly. Talking to a group of corps members who were attending her office hours, she said, “Ask yourself: is your teaching service or philanthropy?”
Two years, or four years even, given to the needy masses as a present from the rich and mighty, for the quiet quid pro quo of networking and resume building, is as much philanthropy as a $10,000 check to an art museum. Don’t get me wrong: Philanthropy is a good thing and we need plenty of it, but it is a gift, nothing more. Philanthropy can be an investment in the community, but also the assuaging of guilt, the buying of indulgences, or a public relations campaign. Literally, it implies an affection for people, no deeper values or ensuing commitments.
Service is work. It is a labor wrought for the benefit of others. It implies that the power is in the hands of the one being served, connoting a sense of humility and selflessness in the very act. Serving must be modified into “self-serving” to suggest a personal benefit. When you serve your community or your country, you validate its needs and subsume your own. Service demands an egalitarian value, a belief that the people being served are worthy of the work.
Think about it in fire and brimstone terms: A life spent accruing wealth and then divvying it up in philanthropy must still be reconciled at some great accounting in the sky, where pecuniary profits derived from the sins of commerce might be balanced by the most immense and effective charity. A life spent in service is pure profit of the soul.
I don't want to be a philanthropist. I believe that my work is, and must be, service. I know I am coming back to The Trenches because I have closely held its satisfaction and I cannot imagine giving it up. I am not rich, but I have enough money to taste the shallow sustenance offered by some of the more exquisite fruits of the material world. There is nothing I can buy that will outlast its own memory. There is nothing I can buy that will return the investment made in me by my family and community. There is nothing I can buy that can create more justice or less suffering. There is nothing I can buy that will make me a wiser, better person. So if these are what I want, there is nothing I can do but serve.
Some days, as I drive home in anger and agony, I repeat to myself, “Service is joy.” It comes from a well-known piece in a book of prayer read at my dinner table growing up, “I slept and dreamt that life was joy./I awoke and saw that life was service./I acted and behold! Service was joy.” Service is joy not because it is easy nor fun but because it is deeply liberating. It is joyful outside of the daily and weekly stress, joyful in the passing seasons and years. Service is the emancipation from self-doubt, it is the freedom from life-angst, it is the escape from the agonizing puzzlement of “Who am I?” and “What am I supposed to do?”
I know that I am a servant and I am here to serve.
We need people to serve in all the myriad ways people are talented, from fire-fighters to florists. I choose to serve in education and at an actual school. I choose education because I love learning and it calls to me as fire-fighting and floristry do not. I also know that there is a purity of service in people-work that is difficult to find in commerce and industry. I feel drawn to be a writer, for instance, but I suspect I would find myself compromising my service for the sake of my art or my wallet. Whether in finding any true vocation, one finds a way to pure service, is a whole other question. I know education works for me.
I choose to serve in the classroom because I feel that, so long as I can, I must. The farther you go from washing the feet of the people you serve, the closer you get to philanthropy and its inherent disrespect. When you can no longer name the names of the people whose lives you effect, you drift ever closer to seeing them as simply another form of the bottom line. Are improving proficiency rates and improving profit margins that different, if all you see are the numbers? Humility and egalitarianism are certainly not evinced by the vast majority of the policies and "resources" dropped down on us from the district office and every level above. Those were once people of service. How can I trust myself to be that much different?
My life in China, my work helping really rich kids do amazing things with technology, will be fun and fantastic, but as I can never see it as service, it cannot be as satisfying and it cannot be as joyful as my life here. That is why I will return to The Trenches. This work is my service. Service is my joy.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Real Teacher Leaves to Live Real Life
I resigned my position today, effective at the end of the school year. I’ve known, and told my staff, in February that I’d be leaving, but in an effort to keep my eye on the ball, I’ve not wanted to dwell on it. Today, however, I finally had to send the letter and admit to the reality.
Mine is not the stereotypical narrative of new teacher flame-out. At my school, I am completely supported and highly appreciated, given tremendous flexibility and even, based on extended-duty, comparatively well compensated for my time. (comparative only with other teachers, mind you) Nor is mine the edu-epic tale of taking a stand, ---there’s been no drama, no need for a sudden change of heart. If anything, things have been better this year than any before. I am grieved to leave my colleagues and The Man, especially as we seem perched on the cusp of success, and it breaks my heart to walk around campus and see the faces of all the kids I won’t teach.
Fundamentally, I am leaving because I am not a feel-good movie character, I am real man with a real life. I am getting married this summer, to another teacher in a similarly high-challenge school. Before we settle in to a lifetime of fighting the good fight here in the seniority-uber-alis public schools, we both want to live abroad. We love to travel and we know that once we have kids and a mortgage, this sort of adventure will be closed off to us.
For the next two years, my soon-to-be wife and I will be living and teaching in Shanghai, China. We would do the Peace Corps, but alas, ---being real people--- some matters of medical necessity interfered. We would teach in Costa Rica, and learn Spanish while we’re at it, but alas, ---being real people--- some matters of financial necessity interfered. So we’re going to Shanghai and we’re very excited.
I’m leaving the classroom, as well as the country. I will be working as a technology specialist, teaming with classroom teachers to integrate technology in their 2nd to 5th grade classes. I’ll also get a little time to work on other projects, including an educational technology conference. After four years of teaching fifth grade, I am ready for the intellectual stimulation of a new challenge.
It would be a disservice to pretend, however, that the coughs and sputters of burn-out are completely absent from my professional drive. My wife and I are committed to being in, not just in the cushy policy chairs above or alongside, our highest need public schools. But we are also exhausted. Four years of a non-stop-eleven-hour day and an utterly lifeless work week, four years of being buried under the urgent needs of our kids, four years of watching our gains be eroded by the misdeeds of incompetent peers and administrators, these four years have primed us for a classic fifth year exit from the profession in toto. Instead, we’re just hoping to take a break. We are leaving while we still believe in our public schools and plan to come back in two years ready again to do battle with educational inequity.
A new job in a new country, will change my life, and this blog, completely. The URL will remain the same, but the work and the words will be very different. While I can no longer make any pretense to being “From The T.F.A. Trenches,” I hope you will nonetheless continue to join me as I write of this new adventure.
Mine is not the stereotypical narrative of new teacher flame-out. At my school, I am completely supported and highly appreciated, given tremendous flexibility and even, based on extended-duty, comparatively well compensated for my time. (comparative only with other teachers, mind you) Nor is mine the edu-epic tale of taking a stand, ---there’s been no drama, no need for a sudden change of heart. If anything, things have been better this year than any before. I am grieved to leave my colleagues and The Man, especially as we seem perched on the cusp of success, and it breaks my heart to walk around campus and see the faces of all the kids I won’t teach.
Fundamentally, I am leaving because I am not a feel-good movie character, I am real man with a real life. I am getting married this summer, to another teacher in a similarly high-challenge school. Before we settle in to a lifetime of fighting the good fight here in the seniority-uber-alis public schools, we both want to live abroad. We love to travel and we know that once we have kids and a mortgage, this sort of adventure will be closed off to us.
For the next two years, my soon-to-be wife and I will be living and teaching in Shanghai, China. We would do the Peace Corps, but alas, ---being real people--- some matters of medical necessity interfered. We would teach in Costa Rica, and learn Spanish while we’re at it, but alas, ---being real people--- some matters of financial necessity interfered. So we’re going to Shanghai and we’re very excited.
I’m leaving the classroom, as well as the country. I will be working as a technology specialist, teaming with classroom teachers to integrate technology in their 2nd to 5th grade classes. I’ll also get a little time to work on other projects, including an educational technology conference. After four years of teaching fifth grade, I am ready for the intellectual stimulation of a new challenge.
It would be a disservice to pretend, however, that the coughs and sputters of burn-out are completely absent from my professional drive. My wife and I are committed to being in, not just in the cushy policy chairs above or alongside, our highest need public schools. But we are also exhausted. Four years of a non-stop-eleven-hour day and an utterly lifeless work week, four years of being buried under the urgent needs of our kids, four years of watching our gains be eroded by the misdeeds of incompetent peers and administrators, these four years have primed us for a classic fifth year exit from the profession in toto. Instead, we’re just hoping to take a break. We are leaving while we still believe in our public schools and plan to come back in two years ready again to do battle with educational inequity.
A new job in a new country, will change my life, and this blog, completely. The URL will remain the same, but the work and the words will be very different. While I can no longer make any pretense to being “From The T.F.A. Trenches,” I hope you will nonetheless continue to join me as I write of this new adventure.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
