Life's not Fair.

Life’s not fair.

The answer is:  It depends.

These phrases used to frustrate me, and now frustrate my candidates as they ready themselves for student teaching.  They want things to be smooth and clean.  Predictable.  The textbook/lesson plan/mentor/principal/internet has the magical answer. Given that belief, they feel confident in their ability to teach.  They feel ready to leave the nest and head into the wilds.  And yet, and yet.  They are about to be hit hard with the knowledge of how much work it takes to be a good teacher.  How you plan the best lesson ever, and it will bomb.  How some students will not buy what you are selling, and it has nothing to do with you.  How one reading strategy will not transfer from one text to another, one management tactic will not transfer from one class to another, how your relationships with individuals and classes evolve and devolve in seemingly random ways. 

My cooperating teacher, who became my friend, principal, and first mentor, said it simply: Life’s not fair.  There are many promises based on the same premise as the American Dream:  if you work hard, you will achieve your goals.  If you are fair, respectful, and know your stuff, students won’t smoke pot in the neighbor’s yard, or fight on a school trip, or come to school drunk.  Uh-huh.

But then you will have an oppositional student who later becomes an English teacher, she says, because of you.  Or you will have a candidate who did not get along with either of her cooperating teachers and who is now applying for National Board certification.  These balance the kids you had to kick out of school and the candidates you had to kick out of the program and blame you. 

I remember being shocked at the idea of nature being nondiscriminatory.  I somehow had the idea, perhaps because it was called “Mother Nature,” that nature was benevolent and kind, like some kind of divine goddess with flowers woven in her hair.  It’s taken me a long time to reconcile that nature is many opposite things—beautiful and ugly, calm and violent, loving and angry.  There are patterns, but these patterns are not regular and predictable, as was reiterated this year with its tornadoes, hurricanes, and snowstorms. 

Teaching is like that.  There are patterns, but they are not set in concrete.  No student is the same day after day; no lesson is the same from one year to the next; and no routine is eternally effective. 

While I am happy my candidates feel confident and ready in their pedagogical content knowledge, I also know that they are about to find out the secrets of teaching that keep some of us in the profession and drive others away.  Teaching is unpredictable, and the answer to most questions is…It depends.