The Standardization of the Soul

Sometimes it's hard to be a teacher.

Oh, I love my kids. I love it when they talk to me about their lives, when they think, when they grapple with a skill or a concept and finally wrestle it into submission, even when they break my heart with the parts of themselves they let slip while I'm watching.

But being entrenched in a system that--as a general rule--cares about the brain and not the soul sometimes drains the life out of me. Sure, all schools are different, and not all teachers fall prey to the whims of a state education department whose solution to all educational ills oftentimes seems to be nothing more than numbers and data and graphs and figures, one more black mark on a sea of white. I try to be one of these renegades, I really do. But sometimes my inability to reach my own expectations for what great teaching looks like couples with my disillusionment at being a cog in a wheel, and I feel utterly helpless.

Right now I'm working on an end-of-the-semester culminating research project for my first Master's class at Binghamton University. My research is predicated on the belief that in order to learn, kids must be engaged. They must be motivated. They must be driven from the inside. In order to be motivated--particularly in the areas of reading and writing--kids need to see that literacy is about communication, about stepping into the madness, the ugly-beauty, that is humanity and becoming a thinking, living, acting part of it. As I read article after article about student motivation, I find myself pronouncing unspoken "Amen's" to much of it. The issue is that as I find myself taking a step back to look at my vocation and to name it Good, Beautiful even, I also catch a glimpse of myself and feel incapable of holding up my end of the bargain. I want to help my students see life writ large, but how? When a student walks through my classroom door and my mind is swirling with his IEP goals and how in the world I can help him pass the subjects he is falling so miserably behind in and when I feel like my 24-hour days need to swell to 48 before I can get everything done, when his mind is swirling with his Grandpa who works until 6 and his increasingly senile Grandma and his mother who--thank God--is no longer incarcerated, and the fact that he can hardly tell which way is up, whether the cloud ever has a silver lining, or why he's even in school... when this is life for both of us, tell me how can I be what I want to be to this boy? How can I help him see what life is in the 35 minutes we have together each day?

At times like this, the only thing I can think to do is love him. Simply love him and hope for the best. Love him as Christ loves him, and trust that somehow life will fill in its own outlines with each of his passing years and that I can--just by being there--help him have the courage to look at it and perhaps one day, if God sees fit, pronounce it worth the living.