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Today is a good day to think about all we ask of teachers.
Not the way we usually do… with stories of the martyr teacher who sacrifices all for her students. Because while that story is a powerful one, we often tell it for the wrong reason.
That story is important because many of those teachers leave the classroom after a few years. Often times, those teachers get taken advantage of by administrators who love that young teacher who can’t say no, because, let’s face it, there’s always more to do and rarely enough folks to do it. So in too many schools — especially the places where we serve children of color and children of poverty — we create systems that are unsustainable, then we work those who are willing to do the extra work until they can no longer do the work.
I stopped writing to re-read that paragraph to see if it felt as much like I was channelling Boxer from Animal Farm as I thought I was. I debated re-writing it, but the metaphor works. Those teachers believe in the school and will often do anything for the school… until they can’t anymore.
There are over three million teachers in America. Most of them bring their work home with them every night. The overwhelming majority of them take the emotions of the job home with them far too often. And yet, all over America, right now, teachers are finishing lesson plans and preparing themselves to be the best version of themselves for the kids in the classes tomorrow.
All of this and we live in a political time when teachers unions are treated like a political football in ways that we haven’t seen a union treated in decades.
Every parent should want the teaching life to be sustainable. It’s in our vested interests as a society to make sure that teachers sleep more than six hours a night, and feel like they can do their jobs well. It’s in the best interests of our nation to make sure that the people who teach our children don’t feel like they have to martyr themselves to serve the children in their charge.
We want our teachers to have rich full lives outside the classroom. We want them to be amazing parents and partners. We want them to have the time to read the occasional book, take a vacation, and maybe even go to the gym every now and then.
And we should want all this because it will make them better teachers.
And that’s the thing that we should not forget this Labor Day. We are a better country when the lives of our countrymen and women are in balance. What the fight for labor rights has gotten us is a better nation – despite all the mountains we have left to climb. Nowhere should that be more powerfully obvious than in our schools.
We, as a society, must take care of our teachers and not let them labor too long. After all, our teachers are who take care of our children.