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My Name Is Tom. I’ve Been a Teacher for 10 Years and I Still Get My Ass Kicked Nearly Every Day.

BY April 20, 2017
Hey, guess what? This teacher wrote a book! It's called “IT WON’T BE EASY: An Exceedingly Honest (and Slightly Unprofessional) Love Letter to Teaching,” and you can get it here.
  No, it won’t be easy. It won’t be easy during your first year or your second. It won’t be easy in your 10th year or your 20th. It won’t be easy in fall, and definitely won’t be easy in winter, and absolutely won’t be easy in spring. Summer is pretty easy, but teaching won’t be easy and being a teacher isn’t easy. The danger of pretending it’s easy, of pretending we have the right answers is that struggle too quickly feels like failure. I spent my first few teaching years sure that it wasn’t right for me because I was tired every day, because I went home every night with a pocket full of losses and a few wins slipping through my fingers. Everyone around me seemed to be doing fine. Everyone around me had the same sort of easy answers we wish were true. We say silly things like, “Set high expectations and the students will meet them.” But we skip all the things between setting and achieving expectations that are the real work of teaching. What we mean is, “Set high expectations, communicate them effectively and while simultaneously communicating concern and love and respect, and reinforce all those things while not enforcing your high expectations in a way that will damage your relationships or that tries to be too much of a buddy. Also, check yourself constantly to make sure your expectations are focused on students, are not reflections of your own Whiteness or experiences, and then some of your students will meet them, but not all, and not on all days.” We lie to ourselves. We tell ourselves it’s the full moon, or too close to a long weekend or the weather is weird. We tell ourselves this week is just off, but we’re close, so close, to when things will calm down. Any day now, "Calm City," that’s us. We lie to new teachers. We tell them that teaching is the sort of puzzle there are answers for. We are given what is meant to be answers in the form of new curriculum and online reading nonsense and district initiatives and classroom engagement strategies. We are given uniform approaches for complex problems that are not constant between schools, between classrooms, between days. Here’s an unsolvable equation, the variables always change. Get it right, it’s easy, and don’t forget to show your work. But those big answers don’t work enough. Nothing works well enough for all kids except working specifically for each kid. That’s not easy. That’s never easy. It’s not easy, it won’t be, no matter how often we tell that to new teachers, no matter what inspirational speech or email or professional development tells us how easy it can be if only we all just did this one thing. No matter how much our district and national leaders wish there were easy answers that made teacher ability matter less, it’s not easy, it won’t ever be. The struggle isn’t just inevitable, it’s important. It shows us where to get better, where to adapt, where to throw out the old answers and come up with some new ones. There’s no better sign that things are going poorly in a room than a teacher who always thinks everything is going just fine. My name is Tom. I’m a teacher and I get my ass kicked nearly every day. I get too angry, too disappointed. I have to learn to wear my urgency a little further from the surface. Also, my class is probably too boring still and I can’t seem to talk for more than thirty seconds without getting interrupted. Some nights I struggle getting to sleep or staying asleep because I’m worrying about that one kid, or that one class, or what next or what better. I’ve started my 10th year in the classroom, and it won’t be easy. It will, on balance, be worth it.
An original version of this post appeared on Mr Rad's Neighborhood as It Won't Be Easy. Check out this interview with Tom about his new book.
Photo by @ajknapp, Twenty20-licensed.
Tom Rademacher
Tom Rademacher (Mr. Rad to his students) is an English teacher in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 2014 he was named Minnesota Teacher of the Year. He teaches writing and writes about teaching on his blog. His book, published by University of Minnesota Press, is called "IT WON’T BE EASY: An Exceedingly Honest (and Slightly Unprofessional) Love Letter to Teaching."
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