Are you a real teacher?

If the identity fits, wear it

A question substitute teachers get a lot is, “Are you a real teacher?” Early on in my career I started to answer, “No, I am a figment of your imagination,” which gave me the opportunity to teach the concept of a figment of your imagination. The kids I teach haven’t heard that phrase before. The kids I teach often don’t know what the Senate is, or which came first, the Civil War or the American Revolution.

I haven’t gotten that question in a long time. I guess I seem like a real teacher now. I remember my mentor correcting me swiftly once when I said, “I’m just a sub.” “You are not ‘just’ anything,” she said. “You are a teacher. A teaching certificate does not make you a teacher. Teaching makes you a teacher.”

I miss her so much.

I took a long term assignment teaching seventh and eighth grade in a classroom that has had no teacher for over a month. The previous one left and they’ve been through four subs. The kids desperately need stability and so do I, so like stray cats and humans, we are rescuing each other.

I love my new kids. They are kids, and they are urban kids, and it will take awhile to get used to behaving, but they are good kids.

I reject the label “bad kids.” There are no bad kids. There are just kids who haven’t yet figured out how they fit into the school world, or the adult world. I am particularly good with what they call “bad kids.” It’s odd since I was an almost pathologically good kid. I was Little Miss Perfect, and held out until my late thirties to do anything bad. I still have avoided doing anything illegal, other than civil disobedience in college. I even cross the street at the crosswalk. Seriously.

Sometimes the lifestyle of a teacher is hard, but I love the actual act of teaching. Seventh and eighth are my favorites because the kids are at a point where they are grown up enough to understand what’s going on but still fanciful, still able to entertain the possibility that I might ride a dragon.

You know I ride a dragon, right? When the traffic is bad.

A student asked me, “Miss, are you a Trump supporter?” We were studying an article about the Senate so it was not out of nowhere. It would have been so easy to say, “Of course not,” and fit in with a liberal leaning demographic, but I said, “I don’t discuss my politics at school. It would be inappropriate.” Then I proceeded to teach what the word inappropriate means. I teach new words every chance I get.

I don’t bring my politics into the school. I’m there to give these kids a shot at a better life, and that means learning first and foremost how to behave in a civilized manner, then how to read and write and speak. Younger kids often ask if I am Mary Poppins, to which the only possible answer is, “Yes.

The identity of a teacher fits me at this time in my life. I’m old enough to not need to be doing something glamorous. I’ve fought wars, which is what union organizing campaigns are. Now just fighting the inertia of the dysfunctional environment of urban poverty that my kids live in is enough. They need so much structure and attention and love, and I’m good at giving it to them.

I try to get the kids to express themselves in ways that will help them get jobs and get more education in the future. I take what they say in urban slang and turn it into as proper English as I can. They think it’s a fun game, usually. I’m trying to give them paths out of poverty. There is so little that one individual can do in this world, but when you’re a teacher, you suddenly have a tremendous amount of power in a group of people’s lives.

Teaching gives me a lot of motivation to work on myself. I have to bring the best version of me every day so that the kids see a good role model. No matter if my car is broken down, I feel sick, and a bag of cat litter just exploded on my living room floor, I owe it to them to show absolute calm and professionalism. I smile more when I teach than at any other time. They need for someone to be happy to see them. They need to feel like they will be missed if they don’t come to school. They need someone to care that they get home safe and care if they had a nice weekend. I do. I don’t have to fake it.

Really, everyone needs this, but kids at a formative age more than many. I can tell if their families have been affected by gun violence and all the effects of it. Where we live it is endemic ( a word I’ll be sure to teach them!)

My college advisor, Dr. Jaroslav Pelikan of blessed memory, was the world’s foremost church historian. He said to my father, “She’s not a scholar. She’s a teacher.”

Maybe someone could have mentioned that to me, but I wasn’t ready. When I was younger I wanted a very different kind of life, and I lived it. Got the battle scars to prove it.

Now I love being able to help the next generation. It’s so absurd when people say that women without children have no stake in the future. Of course I care about the future! I challenge one of those people who hates on childless cat ladies to come in and teach the kids I have responsibility for.

I love how I can be my quirky self with the kids and they think it’s fun. So far from the world of liberal nonprofits where people threaten ritual suicide if you make one comment off the woke script. Grown ups can be so tiresome. These liberal millennials… so serious! (With all due respect to present company, of course! Jill is fun!)

Everything in an urban school is off script. All kinds of crazy things happen and you have to roll with it. It’s a cross between emergency management and improv comedy.

I have to focus on my work a lot, and I put away the parts of myself that do other things while I’m teaching my kids. But when I leave the other parts can come back out.

This afternoon I’m going to the Philadelphia Cherry Blossom Festival with some friends from zen, then tonight it’s my weekly date with Gadi Taub… his podcast anyway. I’ll chop vegetables for Israeli salad and listen to him make mistakes in English… I hope!