I came across this reaction to teaching the other day:
"I had been toiling for nearly an hour. I sat sinking from irritation and weariness into a kind of lethargy. The thought came over me: am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy and the hyperbolic and most asinine stupidity of these fat headed oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity? Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair prisoned within these four bare walls, while the glorious summer suns are burning in heaven and the year is revolving in its richest glow and declaring at the close of every summer day the time I am losing will never come again? Just then a dolt came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited."
Ring any bells? The style might have given it away to some alert readers, but for those of you wondering, this was actually written by Charlotte Brontë in her journal nearly 200 years ago when she worked as a teacher at Roe Head School. Was she ahead of her time, or do we just keep treading the same paths as our predecessors? I’m sure I recall some similar sentiments from the works of D.H. Lawrence, a hundred years after Charlotte Brontë.
Is it idealistic, then, for teachers to imagine that their profession could hold any
surprising developments? Should we warn new recruits to the profession that this is as
good as it mostly gets, so that they are well prepared for the daily grind, even the
urge to “vomit”?! Or what can we do, with all the technology we now have at our
disposal, to change the way we teach, to alter the legacy of irritation, weariness, and
wretched bondage that teaching can be?
Maybe there is no solution, other than to keep journals of the unhappy moments and to spill our guts in the form of the written word, and to keep plodding on, naïvely believing that some jazzy hi-tech solution is just around the corner, and if we keep working at it, then we will be the ones to crack it, to get it right, to teach children who don’t want to learn, to love our jobs day in and day out…
It’s not just a British thing. My barometer of American social issues, The Simpsons, had an episode the other day where Principal Skinner, of Springfield Elementary School, asked one of his permanently cynical teachers, Mrs Krabappel, who was slumped at a bench chain-smoking, if this is how she imagined life would be - if this was as good as it gets. I had to laugh as she replied something like, “Well, I was always depressed as a child…”.
I guess my philosophy is to try to make the best of it. Yes, it is irritating,
exhausting, frustrating, and quite possibly vomit-inducing, to have to battle against
the many dark forces that I rant about on these pages. But you can take a leaf out of
my book. Quite literally! (I’m aiming high here, for the cheesiest and corniest link
to self-promotion the amateur advertising industry has seen this year. Be warned.)
For in May of this year, Ranting Teacher’s very own collection of ideas on how to make the most of a bad situation will be unleashed on an unsuspecting public! Yes, in printed form, courtesy of Continuum Publishers, there will be a collection of the sort of rants you’re all familiar with, followed by a more positive section on how to improve your lot, whether that means dealing with less than professional colleagues, or reading between the lines of kids’ excuses, to surviving parents’ evenings. It’s called Everything You Need to Know to Survive Teaching although I think that’s a bit of an ambitious claim! I think of it fondly as Making Bog-standard Better, because let’s face it, if Charlotte and D.H. couldn’t find the solutions to make the life of a teacher more desirable, I’m sure not going to promise that I can deliver! But do look out for it in book shops or online. And you know, it would make an ideal present for a loved one, a stressed one, or even smuggled into the bag of the most incompetent teacher you know. I'll end this short info-mercial with a zingy white grin - you'll have to imagine that bit...
added 12/4/05
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