Every year, I read George Orwell’s essay “Why I Write ...



Why I Teach 2012

Every year, I read George Orwell’s essay “Why I Write” with my senior class. In it, Orwell writes about motivations – about the reasons that all writers write, and the reasons that he, personally, writes. He describes four reasons that writers write:

1) egoism (basically selfishness, or the desire to be known for being a writer);

2) aesthetics (writers like creating beautiful things);

3) the desire to record history;

4) politics (the desire to make a change in the world).

Orwell concludes that his writing is largely motivated by politics, by wanting to make the world a better place through his work.

After reading the essay, I ask my students to identify something that they do with a similar seriousness as Orwell writes, and to explain the motivations behind it. My version of this assignment is “Why I Teach.” I like to revisit the question every spring, about this time, because I feel my motivations changing from year to year, and because I’m afraid of forgetting. It is pretty easy to go through the motions without thinking about why you’re doing it. That kind of life scares me.

I didn’t set out to be a teacher. When I was growing up I thought I’d be an astronaut, a soldier, a pilot. Silly things like that. When I was five, I told my mom that my fondest wish was to marry a doctor, so I wouldn’t have to work. Then I realized that college professors had the summers off. I didn’t see any other adults with summer vacation, so that was definitely a plus. I also liked how important-sounding it was. That settled it for me: I would grow up to be a college professor.

Somehow, I never came to question my reasons for wanting to be an academic. I just decided on it when I was quite young, and kept at it until it felt too late to do anything else. When I went to college, I studied English. Only when I went to grad school did I realize that I had no interest in being an academic, in becoming a professor. In fact, I hated grad school, basically the place I thought I’d spend my whole life. For eighteen years I’d been sure of what I wanted to do and, really, of who I was. So it was a bit of a shock to find that I was someone else entirely.

I wasn’t sure what else I could do. Believe it or not, advanced degrees in English literature don’t give you a lot of career options. I worked as an editor for years. It was fine, but I think I mostly did it for reasons as bad as the ones that led me to grad school. Mostly, imagined prestige. I liked telling people I was an editor a lot more than I liked actually being an editor.

Also, there was a girl involved.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I came to teaching late. I was 31 before I found myself back in a high school classroom.

So I guess this is the part where I should tell you why I think most teachers teach, and then explain why I do it. First, though I should tell you a bit about what it is like to be a teacher. Because it is ridiculous.

Teaching is full of terrors and drudgery. We have to stand in front of large packs of teenagers every day. That’s scary. We’re always on display, even at our weakest moments. We also grade paper after paper. I actually like this part of the job, but a couple of years ago I did the math and figured out that I read about 8,000 pages of student writing every year. Why, I just read a 32-page paper by Wendy Chu! It was good! But that’s a lot of reading and thinking and commenting.

One last reason teaching is a ridiculous job: I will wake up at 5:30 in the morning for the next thirty years. When you all graduate and go off to college to catch up on your sleep, I’ll still be leaving for work in the dark.

So why do teachers teach? I think there’s a mix of idealism and selfishness involved, though I’m going to try to be a bit more specific than that. Briefly, I think teachers teach for some combination of these reasons:

1. Egoism. We believe that we have something important to say. There’s got to be some ego involved in “molding young minds.”

2. Idealism. We actually want to make a positive impact on people and on the world. And we believe we can. This is roughly analogous to Orwell’s description of writing as a political act.

3. Love for your subject.

4. An affinity for the kids you teach.

5. Lack of imagination. Some of us go through 13 or 17 or 19 or 24 years of school and find that the only thing we know is school. The only thing we can imagine doing is school. And so we sign up for more school!

6. Self-Interest. We actually get something out of it.

I’m sure that there are many, many other reasons teachers teach, but I think we’ve all got a bit of these six in us.

When I finally decided to become a teacher, I had idealistic motives. I wanted to use my love of books for something better than making a little cash for publishing companies. I joined the New York City Teaching Fellows – a program designed to help get second-career professionals into schools that were traditionally hard to staff (in other words: failing schools). After about six weeks of training, I found myself in a classroom in Brooklyn, sustained by idealism (we can change the world from our classrooms!) and egoism (I’m the one who’s going to make a difference!).

For the most part, though, I wasn’t making the kind of difference I’d imagined I would – how could I? I might have been doing some good – my students did a bit better on standardized tests, fewer dropped out, some went to college – but for the most part very little had changed. I started to realize that all the problems of poverty and racism aren’t solved by even the most inspired lesson on Huckleberry Finn. I wasn’t doing much more than filling a seat that needed filling, keeping it warm for the next idealistic teacher.

Our motivations change over time. I still teach, but I do it for different reasons. I became much less idealistic over the course of my first two frustrating years as a teacher. Then I got a job at Stuyvesant, which is a place where some righteously idealistic teachers will tell you that you’ll never make a difference as a teacher, since you guys are already so smart and capable that you just teach yourselves. Who knows, maybe that’s true.

So why do I teach at Stuyvesant? Honestly, I’m sure ego has something to do with it. The school name brings status to anyone associated with it – teacher or student. Even so, I continue to think my job is political. I do believe that I can have an impact on some of my students. But that impact can’t be as strong as when I taught at a more difficult school. I don’t help kids go to college who otherwise wouldn’t have, I don’t push students to graduate who otherwise would have dropped out.

A couple years ago, I probably would have told you that I was mainly teaching to share my love of books, to try to help others see what can be so useful and illuminating in reading and writing, the ways that they can make our lives better, more worth living. I still think that’s true, but a couple of years ago, I started thinking about teaching in a different way. When you teach seniors in high school, there’s a sometimes-difficult process of letting go involved. As the school year nears its close, seniors start to come to terms with the fact of their graduating, growing up. For some, this is not a natural time to, say, do a lot of homework. This is frustrating to teachers.

It is also a good time for reflection. One day two Junes ago, Mohammed Rahman sat in front of the class to tell us a story about a song that reminded him of a time when he feared for his mother’s life. As he told the story, the sadness of the memory was clear. Then he sang us the song, a Bengali folk song. He began to cry. We all began to cry. After Mohammed sat down, Miriam Lorbert came to the front of the room. She told us about her grandfather’s death in the Holocaust and her father’s death of cancer, neither of which she’d been able to talk about before.

Their openness was inspiring, but I don’t teach to hear confessions. I teach because of what came next: everyone in the room, all 35 of us, gathered around Mohammed and Miriam, to comfort them, thank them, commune with them. Since then, I’ve noticed how deeply I’ve been moved by similar moments of generosity, of skill, of honesty.

Now when I think about teaching, I think less about what I give other people. Maybe I don’t teach to “create the leaders of tomorrow” or to “mold young minds.” Really, I teach because, sometimes, my students remind me how good, kind, creative, and generous human beings can be. Thank you.

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