Dear colleague,

I think there are two ways to live the teacher's life and that we need a bit of both of them.

• The engaged teacher is all about the life of the school, its staff, and its students. She participates in spirit days or sponsors a club; he lives within walking distance of the school or attends student sporting events and extracurricular activities. This teacher gets all the good press. She's the hero in the movie; he's the one we can always count on. They embody who we are as a school and who we're striving to be.
• The disengaged teacher is checked out. She's here but not all the way. Spirit weeks come and go (about once every other week nowadays), and his attire stays the same. When the call for volunteers goes out, this teacher's hand ain't moving. Emails sent to this person might as well be sent to the moon. They're gone. This teacher typically gets a bad rap. She must not care; he's burned out.

We Need Both Modes

The trouble with my descriptions above is that they're positioned like categories or identities. You're either one or the other. You can't be both.

Realistically, though, most of us adopt one mode sometimes and the other mode other times. I think that's really the way to do it.

• If you tend too much toward engaged teacher mode, you run the risk of either burning yourself out or ending up desperate for acceptance/recognition or just going crazy. In my career, I've seen one person who can pull off 100% engagement, 100% of the time — my boss. But he's really not a normal dude — ask anyone. Imagine if within the universe of Ted Lasso there was a TV show depicting a guy that inspired Ted Lasso. That's basically what Todd is like. (I'm not kidding, come meet him.) But for the rest of us, a habit of purposeful disengagement is needed to avoid the paths of stumbling into crash-and-burn or self-aggrandizement or myopic folly. (Not that I would know or anything…)
• If you tend too much toward disengaged teacher mode, you run the risk of forgetting why you teach and understanding where you teach. With where I'm at in life right now — teaching, writing, parenting four kids, owning a home — this mode has a pretty strong gravitational pull on me. And that's not a bad thing — intentional disengagement is an important tool in the flourishing life. But for folks like me, we need to develop a habit of purposeful engagement to avoid stumbling into parched-soul apathy or self-deluding isolation or “in just X more years, I can retire.”

Just some things to ponder, colleague.

Engaging and disengaging right beside you,

DSJR

P.S. With it being a new year and all, this might also be a way to think about the whole New Year's Resolution idea. What thing(s) do you want to intentionally engage with more this year? What thing(s) do you want to intentionally disengage with more this year?