Teaching Is Absurd

Dear colleague,

My friend Shelly Alvarez refers to especially tricky or wild or crazy situations in the classroom as “special opportunities.” When she says it, there's this big, goofy grin on her face and her eyes are just a few clicks to the left of sane. It is perfect.

Of all the months of the school year, October might as well be called Special Opportunity Month. It's the month when we hit the Wall of the teacher's journey. Sometimes we can articulate the difficulty; other times, it leaves our bodies as an exhausted gurgle.

And so today, I'd like to touch on a related idea, which is that teaching is absurd for at least four reasons.

• First, there's us in our finitude. We are constrained beings, limited in our time and energy and inability to multitask. Despite the ethos of our times, we can't do it all, be it all, complete it all, achieve it all. No amount of machinery or technology will ever change that either.
• Second, there's the enormous complexity of our students. Each of them is a never-before-seen instance of humanity, fearfully and wonderfully wrought. They are mostly invisible creatures — we can see their faces and their work but not the immense web of experiences and relationships and chemicals and hormones and beliefs that make them them. And we don't teach just one of these confounding creatures, but rather many dozens. Wild.
• Third, there's the timeless depth of the disciplines we teach. We teach subjects built over millennia, explored and delineated by over 100 generations. In math we build on Ptolemy; in art, on the cave drawings at Lascaux; in engineering, on the wheel-making of Mesopotamia; and on and on. And for all these disciplines, the boundaries are expanding every day, advanced by the ceaseless desire, unique to our species, to learn and grow.
• And fourth, all of these absurdities exist within the crazy context of our times. Ours is a world bent toward transforming beautiful human creatures into dopamine-hacked, attention-fracked, engagement-addicted, neomaniacal narcissists. That's brutally put, I know — but I'm a fan of facing the brutal facts.

So teaching is absurd in that entails us finite creatures working to connect dozens of boundlessly complex students with the cosmos-depths of disciplines in a rather dystopian context. 

Absurd. Crazy. Nuts.

If you don't laugh, you'll cry.

So, laugh.

Because just about all of the amazing things that have happened in human history contained absurd ingredients just like these. There's something freeing about saying, “Yup — this is crazy. Sign me up.” Because despite these absurdities, a massive good will come from our work this year, provided that we pursue it with the earnestness and craftsmanship and spirit our profession calls for. I'm not talking about doing it perfectly; I'm talking about doing it awake. Good comes from regular classrooms led by regular teachers like you and me, even in the midst of the wildness of what we're doing. We really never know what good our work will do, but at the same time we can be confident that simple, good work in a classroom will do a kind of good that ripples on for generations.

I'm talking about crazy stuff right now, but I'm not crazy. These are truths as evident, if we keep our eyes on the lookout, as the fact that you and I are breathing air right now.

So, is teaching crazy?

Yup.

Is teaching especially nuts in October? Like “grueling and soul-straining” nuts?

For sure.

But also — also! — it's sooooooooo good.

Feeling the burn right beside you, colleague,

DSJR