A Different Call to Arms
by Kathleen K. Ruen
From calls to arm teachers in the classroom to strikes in West Virginian, Puerto Rico, and Oklahoma, teachers are once again in the spotlight. It is not coincidental that these issues come to the fore at a time when teachers in our country are under assault. Already burdened by high stakes testing, low wages, supply shortages and a growing demand to deal with complex issues from mental health to literacy, teachers are now being asked to take on even more. Fortunately, like our students, we are resilient. We have faced challenges before.
Teachers have been in a second class position since the creation of free public schools in our country. Our profession was and is still viewed as women’s work. In the past, without the right to vote, women accepted a lower rate of pay and conditions that men would not tolerate. Low compensation and intolerable work conditions have not changed, even though our demographics have. But this has not prevented teachers from doing their jobs helping young citizens of this country grow into thoughtful, educated human beings.
Here are a few of the things that teachers do that the nation may not be aware of: Teachers embody true democracy by balancing the needs of each student while making sure that the classroom community is healthy and functioning as a whole. They navigate the mandates from above and put these often misguided directives alongside their own deep pedagogical knowledge of what works for students in order to find a way to meet the need of the state and the students. Teachers face and take criticism, both subtle and extreme, from care givers, their principals, and from popular culture, yet keep returning to their classrooms to do the hard work of self-reflection and observing how their work really impacts their students learning and lives. Teachers put their own physical and mental health at risk because they do not have the institutional supports in place for them to do their work-they over extend themselves in order to fill in the gaps that society and institutions have left in their students’ lives.
Teachers wages and benefits have not risen comparable to other professions, and benefits and collective bargaining rights have eroded, making it a profession that few would choose to support themselves or their families-many teachers take on additional work just to make ends meet at home, Excessive and high stakes testing and high school exit exams have made it nearly impossible for teachers to actually teach-their days are filled with either preparing for a test or monitoring assessments that the students must take-assessments that take the place of real learning. Teachers may have contracted hours from 8:00-3:00pm, but most put in at least twice that amount of time a day, not counting their weekends grading papers, preparing for their classes, buying materials from their own wallets for their classrooms, telephoning parents and writing up observations and reports. The work that teachers do is so demanding and unsupported that many end up leaving. Perhaps this turnover is exactly what education reformers want, but turnover negatively affects schools and students. The longer a teacher teaches with support and professional development, the better they will become.
Teachers are quiet heroes. Their heroism ranges from the daily efforts of a teacher to reach one child in their classroom who needs extra care all the way to teachers putting their lives on the line-some of them sacrificing their lives-in order to protect their students from gun violence. The health of teachers and students are intertwined, and both need society to step up and address their needs. Educators have been calling for support of their work and of their students for decades, and no one has listened. We have had enough,
This is a call to action and a call to arms for teachers. We need to become politically active in the systems we inhabit, from the National to the local level. We need to stir up the structures that oppress us and the young people we care for. We need to find common allies, build coalitions, and, as a collective, use our power to halt the destruction of schooling while at the same time build schools that are in true service to students, their families, and the communities they call home. The arms of teachers can defend and build.
As teachers, we also need to use our powerful arms to hold, hug, and protect the students that we teach. We need to say to students that have been excluded and are now under threat that “I see you and I value you.” We need to take time from our rigorous days to give space and time for students to express their ideas, fears, and dreams. We need to build a classroom environment where children can thrive in order to give a counter message to a national atmosphere of negativity and hate.
Why am I calling on teachers to take on this herculean task, to make their arms almost break with effort, and to add to our already impossible, highly complicated role of educating our citizenship? Because teachers have a source of energy and inspiration that few adults do. Teachers have their students.
Students, from age 0-100, but especially those in early childhood and elementary settings, embody hope because they are in the process of growth and are attuned to their environment in a way that most adults have lost sight of. Our students have unbounded energy, powerful feelings, and have a deep understanding of fairness and justice-perhaps because they have been living under the care/control of adults for their whole life and know what it means to be oppressed.
Our students have the capacity to change the world, shown by the surge of activism in the Black Lives Matter Movement and in the National School Walkouts on March 14th and April 20th. Every moment we give to our students, every word we say to encourage and inspire them, and every time we help them come to a new understanding, we can help them become more affective in their future lives. Teachers are powerful because, as Sonia Nieto writes in her amazing book, What Keeps Teachers Going, “Teachers change lives forever.”
So teachers, we have a hard road ahead. We are despised for our assumed gender and demeaned for our work. We are the first to be blamed, starting from well and not so well-meaning parents all the way to our past, present, and future leaders. We cannot expect to be loved, respected, or supported by any adult, even though we work with the most precious and valuable resource of our country. We are constantly having to work around top-down mandates and laws that prevent us from doing the work we know is the most important. We cannot expect anyone to care or value our work, because every citizen in this country has experienced teachers, and their perception of our profession is seen though their narrow lens, rather than the complex and nuanced reality of what we do every day.
The obstacles we face as teachers are all based on lies. We can see through these lies because we see the truth every day through the eyes of the students we teach, through hearing their stories, and through witnessing the stunning ways that they are making sense of this upside-down world. Our students deserve our arms, and they will reciprocate with their own, which we can only hope will someday build a humane nation that we can truly be proud of.
If you do not call yourself a teacher, I call on you as a citizen to use your arms to help us in our work. We need your support more than ever.
Teachers! Citizens! To Action! To Arms!