The Loss Of Our Teacher Self And Why It Matters by Christine Vaccaro

Education may be unrecognizable right now, but one constant remains. June is still June. 

Our students still brim with liberation fantasies, even if we can’t see them bouncing off our classroom walls like rogue pinballs. Now, they simply ghost their grid boxes and ignore online assignments as if these were merely suggestions. Nevertheless, it is clear: the year is done, our students are done...and we are done, too. The finish line has risen in the distance, and we have begun lurching our broken, bankrupt bodies by the elbows towards it. Just like old times. 

Except, it is nothing like old times.

There’s June-exhausted.  And then there’s June-after-a-virus-imploded-our-education-system-followed-by-three-months-of-teaching-remotely-in-quarantine-while-our-country-launches-into-a-revolution-exhausted. This year’s teacher-tired is without any semblance of precedent.  

Summer 2020 has some hefty restorative work on the agenda. Ripped from our classrooms and students practically mid-sentence, we were plopped down at our kitchen tables and directed to Rube Goldberg the education system in a vain attempt to maintain the charade of its apocalyptic, mid-pandemic functionality. The intensity continues as a long overdue social justice uprising unfurls -- the full manifestation of what our divisive, racist past and current president has wrought. In addition, we have likely confronted a personal crisis or three. Physical illness, mental health, homeschooling, elder care, and financial hardship are just some of the more common crises. Add to these the abstract stressor of absorbing the pervading fear, pain and anger in the collective. It is a safe assumption that not one of us has been left untouched by trauma and loss, and it is no wonder most of us saw our batteries die well before we were out of May.

These dramatic and grueling realities contribute to our extraordinary June fatigue. But they do not account for its entirety. Make no mistake: we have not been teaching, we have been crisis managing. And in the fog of this emergency, our depletion has been compounded by a profound loss we have had neither the time nor presence to acknowledge: the dissolution of our Teacher Self.  

Few careers carry as archetypal a mantle as Teacher. That is why we are so entwined with, and moored by, the identity. While many professionals experienced shifts in their present work life, it is different for us. For most, teaching is a vocation -- a word that comes from the Latin for spiritual calling. We did not fill out an application; we were summoned. We don’t just do a job, we are our job. And when that job as we know it ceased to exist a few months ago, a huge chunk of ourselves went along with it. Without pausing to mourn this loss, we simply continued engaging in the facade that remote teaching connected to our professional identities, painstakingly crafted through experience and hard knocks. And that is inherently depleting.

Remote teaching has proven that we ply this trade through the cultivation of relationships. We do this in the demonstration of our Teacher Self. We wield this powerful tool in the daily practice of our authentic -- and in-person -- interactions with students. Our Teacher Self is an extension of our personalities, blended with our individual brand of schtick.  We all have that morning greeting. That reward for good work. That tactic we use to diffuse a situation, or to check in with an upset student. The one-liners, responses and maxims we dispense, day after day, year after year -- the indelible sayings a student recalls long after they have left our charge and forgotten our lessons. These are how we create unique connections with our students, but for the past three months our work has been bereft of this genuine relatedness. Remote teaching excessed our Teacher Selves. 

A friend directed me to this brilliant analysis of why the now-normative Zoom culture is a new societal drain:

I spoke to an old therapist friend today, and finally understood why everyone’s so exhausted after the video calls. It’s the plausible deniability of each other’s absence. Our minds tricked into the idea of being together when our bodies feel we’re not. Dissonance is exhausting.

— Gianpiero Petriglieri (@gpetriglieri) April 3, 2020, Twitter 

Is it ever. But for educators, there is more to this truth. Yes, we are drained from grappling with the discomfort incurred on our online platforms, but also from the struggle of getting through a work day with a disintegrated identity. Every minute spent in front of the computer isn’t just tiring -- it is a betrayal of our passion and our mission. Our vocation has devolved into a job. Our reality does not align with muscle memory or our personal truth. Dissonance is indeed exhausting.

Another facet of our Teacher Self is our role as tradition keepers. We are present for, and facilitate, the transitions that  punctuate our students’ lives. The foundational rituals that offer society a way to process and commemorate milestone moments - weddings, funerals, anniversaries and birthdays-- have been cruelly decimated by this pandemic, but perhaps most merciless are the ones directly affecting our students. This June, as the cancelled graduations, proms, field days, dances, moving up and award ceremonies pile up, we can only bear witness to our students' anguish. In their young lives, these climactic moments are paramount concretizations of their maturation. And not only are there no thresholds to help them cross, we are not around to help them process why. We cannot offer our students even the most basic closure to a year that their children and grandchildren will one day study in history. We cannot even say good-bye.

Along with our Teacher Self, the circle of educational life has been irrevocably broken, and an unknown future awaits. September, for many of us, is a vague and foreboding dystopian prospect where the triage teaching we have been attempting will probably somehow be integrated into institutionalized practice. It’s very possible many of us will be meeting students on the first day of school from our kitchen table classrooms -- and we will be amongst the fortunate ones. Others will be excessed, or will leave the field too early.

But there’s good news. Ironically, for a profession built on routines, teaching, at its heart, traffics in transience. We can be certain of uncertainty. That year spent floating between three classrooms, pushing your cart through the student crush of a period change like a determined Black Friday shopper? That will eventually be as distant a memory as the sweetheart schedule with back-to-back preps the last two periods of the day. The class that brought on daily spasms of agita and kept you up nights will be forgotten the following year when you get the group of workhorse darlings who laugh at your corny jokes and chip in for an Amazon Christmas gift card. If you want to survive this gig with some semblance of mental health, you can't get stuck on a student, program, classroom, curriculum, colleague or administrator. Everything is fair game for impermanence, and you must surrender your attachments at the door. Teaching is a living exercise in Zen philosophy. Good, bad or ugly, it simply is what it is in the moment. And all things must pass. 

The routines and rituals that comprise our Teacher Self enable us to weather this impermanence and unknown. And we have never faced more of either than now. This summer, anyone in the realm of education will no doubt be spending some time surveying the ruins of these past few months and attempting to rebuild their part from the ashes. Already there is a glut of vultures circling the wreckage, armed with deep pockets and a shallow understanding of our profession -- but somehow ready to reimagine what we do. Part of that is out of our control. But what we can control is how we reimagine our Teacher Selves. After all that has happened, who is that Self now? What are the essential facets of that Self that can be reconstructed and carried forward?

While we have no idea what next year will look like, we do know that when we report for duty, it must be our fullest, most evolved Teacher Selves who show up. Full recuperation will require some time spent reclaiming this discarded shard of our psyches. As individuals with a more entrenched professional identity than most, this piece is a significant portion of our self-construct. We must honor it this summer to fully heal from this inconceivable year, and be ready for the next. We owe this to ourselves, and to our students.