When teachers say that we’re struggling, our friends, students, former students and parents of our students rush to comfort us, saying things like “you’re doing an amazing job, especially given the circumstances,” or “we’re lucky to have such amazing teachers.”
It’s always nice to hear those things—they really do help. People talk about the challenges teachers face, such as the need to simultaneously be a parent, therapist, nurse, mediator, peacekeeper, nutritionist and mandated reporter for 150 children every day in addition to teaching them to solve problems, read analytically and think critically. People talk about the number of instantaneous decisions that a teacher has to make in any given day. People talk about the challenges of dealing with an administration that doesn’t trust us and has an adversarial relationship with us. Those things are stressful to be sure, but they are normal—they’re what we’re used to handling day in and day out, our baseline. They have all intensified this year, but even that is not the real problem.
The real problem is that the entire system is being stretched to the breaking point. The system has become has become dependent on teachers being amazing; merely proficient is no longer good enough. Before this year, it was OK to have an occasional bad day. Not a career-ending bad day, just a day when try though we might, we are just not up to the tasks before us. Every teacher has one of those from time to time. When we do, we ask the teacher in the next room to watch our class for a minute while we step out and push our internal reset button. We catch a colleague between classes who notices our mental state and reassures us that everyone has days like that. We step into the teachers’ room for a few minutes during our planning period to commiserate over a cup of terrible coffee and a stale doughnut, both of which have been sitting out since 7:45am. We are never more than a couple of classrooms away from someone in our support network.
But now, we are suddenly isolated from our support network. We can’t ask someone to watch our class—our colleagues are running their own Zoom meetings, and they can’t be in more than one meeting at once. We can’t congregate in the teachers’ room because of the requirements of social distancing; the coffee pot was cleaned and put away last March. There is no one in a position to notice how we’re doing and offer a kind word, a piece of chocolate or an alternate perspective at that moment when we need all of those things but haven’t realized it yet. Our support network has moved to social media, inaccessible until after work, hours later.
Teaching, classroom management, and even simple tasks like taking attendance have become much more challenging and taxing, and what little margin for error used to exist is gone. We can’t let it be a bad day, because our bad day will crash into someone else’s day—or maybe multiple someone elses’ days—and ruin theirs as well. And yet every day that we teeter on the edge of figuring out how to teach, manage our classes and deliver effective and engaging lessons remotely, we’re on the bleeding edge of a bad day. Every day.
Whenever we hear about a parent’s struggles, in person, in the news or on social media, we think, “Maybe I could have prevented that. Maybe I could have done something differently that would have made it less difficult for that parent, for that child. Maybe I could have been enough.” And that’s when we realize that it was a bad day after all, even if we didn’t know it at the time. We remind ourselves that we need to do better; we weren’t enough today but we need to be enough tomorrow, even though we don’t know how.
This is our struggle. Again, thank you for telling me that I was amazing today. It really does help. But it also creates the expectation that I will be amazing again tomorrow, and the next day. And the next week. And every week after that.
