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Article Excerpt
The teaching profession remains under siege (see Pinar, 2004), and more and more teachers are leaving the profession after only a few years in the school setting. Those who remain in the profession work harder but too often, with less reward. The satisfactions of this impossibly complex and difficult profession are less and less obvious in this era of accountability and high stakes testing. Traditional satisfactions of teaching often espoused in the literature are harder to realize and even harder to believe in. In a graduate class I recently taught, an interesting occurrence took place. The class citizenry consisted of folk already engaged in, or committed to, the teaching profession, and we gathered in the late afternoon and early evening every week to study. And many study sessions began with vigorous complaint--about their lives in school; about students and parents, and administrators and colleagues; about the system and the government and the standardized tests, and about poverty and disadvantaged homes and feelings of powerlessness. And suddenly LaMont, a handsome tall young man with a honied voice, looked about the group and said, "You know, sometimes I sit here, and I listen to you folks, and I don't know if I want to teach at all." I was startled: it struck me that if life was as horrible as these teachers described, then who, indeed, would choose to be a teacher. I recalled a story: "Sometimes," the Rabbi said, "I am so disgusted with the world that I would like to vomit it up. But then I think, is the world mine to throw up?" Well, I thought, that is one answer.
Perhaps, I considered, in this classroom it was necessary to first vomit up all of the bile and the daily difficulties and indignities of our lives before we could begin to produce new ideas. Perhaps the vituperative talk was a cleansing-like the mikvah, the ritual baths of Jewish custom. One assumes a certain impurity before entering the mikvah, and after immersion there, one feels cleansed. But how sullied the water must get after every bather! The Rabbis mandate that the mikvah consist of swirling waters to ensure the hope of renewal. It is, I suspect, my responsibility to ensure that the waters swirl! And this I think, is one of the satisfactions of teaching.
Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the conversation altered tone, and the talk turned to repair--given the conditions in the world, what could we teachers do to heal? Perhaps LaMont's comment confronted them with their spoken misery, and the others were humbled. Perhaps they remembered what it was that they meant to do every day in their classrooms. Because it was to this purpose that each of them individually addressed themselves for the remainder of our evening. Finally, it is tikkun olam that these teachers believed to be their purpose. It is a familiar theme in Judaism--tikkun olam, the healing of the world, even a complex notion that different ideologies of Judaism interpret in a variety of ways. But what each interpretation shares is that the work of this world is its repair. In our classroom that late afternoon, the voices turned soft and reflective, and each talked of the work they had accomplished that day. It was never of standards, or performance, or curriculum duties that each spoke; rather, it was to the human touch that had been made. We talked, I believe, of healing. The satisfactions of teaching came with great cost and effort and care. To be a teacher, I think, is to be brave. Each day teachers make decisions small and large, remain attentive despite the myriad distractions and mind-numbing environments in which they work, and assert their wills, which is to say, in the constant effort of their behaviors to require thinking from students and to provide relevant material about which to think. Theirs is a formidable task. William James sought for our lives the moral equivalent of war, and argued that the martial type of character, as already evidenced in the education of doctors and priests, and characterized, at least, by "strenuous honor and disinterestedness," must continue to be bred in all if our society is to constructively advance. The country must educate our citizenry for peacetime service just as we educate our army for war. James (1906; http://www. constitution.org/wj/meow.htm) writes,
Such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would have required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would preserve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace. We should get toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is temporary, and threatens not, as now, to degrade the whole remainder of one's life.
It must be their teachers who are responsible for that learning. It is their teachers who would educate James' doctors and priests. Teachers are brave not because they stand "on the front lines" nor function "in the trenches," but because they have accepted the discipline explicit for the moral equivalent of war. Teachers serve as moral exemplars as a result of the very nature of their activities. Simply put, teachers think, and promote that activity in students. In his Talks to Teachers James (1962, p. 91) writes, "If, then, you are asked, 'In what does a moral act consist when reduced to its simplest and most elementary form?' you can make only one reply. You can say that it consists in the effort of attention by which we hold fast to an idea which but for that effort of attention would be driven out of the mind by other psychological tendencies that are there. To think is the secret of will, just as it is the secret of memory." This thinking is not a simple activity, but one that requires sustained attention and effort, and which becomes, therefore, an act of bravery.
Teachers are not only brave, but must help others achieve bravery. Despite the lack of public support or sometimes, even attention, despite the steady calumny to which teachers are subject, the teacher daily engages with the individual and collective products of social and political pasts, and attempts with them somehow to create a viable future. James (1962) writes,
Thus are your pupils to be saved: first, by the stock of ideas with which you furnish them; second, by the amount of voluntary attention that they can exert in holding to the fight ones, however unpalatable; and third, by the several habits of acting definitely on these latter to which they have been successfully trained. (pp. 91-92)
I have argued (Block, 1998, 2007) that education is redemptive, and have suggested (Block, 2004) that study is equivalent to prayer. Indeed, I claimed, to stand in the classroom is to live in awe and wonder. I have even suggested that study prepares this world for the messianic era. James termed this future as socialistic, but regardless of its exact nature, that future promises redemption, and it is the teacher who facilitates this movement through her daily effort. William Pinar writes (2004),
Despite our professional subjugation by politicians seduced by "business" thinking, with its obsession over the "bottom line" (test scores), we must not succumb in spirit. We must remember that education is not a business, that it cannot be measured by test scores, that it is too important to be left to either politicians or parents. (p. 61)
This temerarious stance in the world is not the solitary and unusual act of heroism for which Congressional Medals of Honor are awarded, but occurs daily in the teacher's effort to keep on keeping on. In this article I want to suggest that, finally, to teach is to take an ethical stance in the world. It is we teachers who must stand with the child, care for her, and for the child Teaching is a relationship founded on such ethics, and the satisfactions of teaching are achieved in the difficult achievement of that ethical stance.
The Satisfactions of Teaching
Professor Elliot Eisner (2006, p. 44) announces in a recent article in Educational Leadership that, "each year, thousands of new teachers enter the field. Almost all seek deep satisfaction from the processes of teaching. Among the many satisfactions that exist, I would like to describe six." I appreciate Eisner's summary, though I have my doubts as to its relevance. To me, his article offers a standard, idealized menu of some positive aspects attributed to the teaching profession, but does not address the daily realities that teachers in the field regularly confront. To my mind, Eisner's list appeals to the rewards of teaching reflected upon in moments of tranquility after a lifetime in the classroom, but suggests, after a lifetime in the classroom, (1) none of the profession's difficulties daily experienced there. Eisner's list might lead the reader to believe that when the teacher does not experience the same satisfactions in the classroom as does he, then he or she has only herself to blame. "How we teach," Eisner (2006) writes, "is related to achieving the deep satisfactions of teaching" (p. 46). In the schools toward which Eisner's list points--schools of quality and higher socioeconomic status, schools, I think, like Stanford University--the good teacher would have to be supremely incompetent not to be satisfied. (2) But, in fact, Eisner's list actually offers me no more information about why we teach than when I ask my doctor why he studied medicine to become a physician, and he answers, "To help people!"
According to Eisner, teaching allows him to (a) participate in the world of great ideas, (b) realize a form of immortality, and (c) enact performance, or as Eisner describes it, "to play your own cello" (p. 44). Teaching, Eisner continues, (d) provides opportunities to create and participate in forms of aesthetic experience, (e) experience and represent a passion for learning, and finally, (f) make a difference...
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