Doing My 1/48th
The choice is clear: You must dedicate yourself to an impossible cause - not because it will lead to anything, but because it is the right thing to do. - Andrew Body
The truth is that nowadays almost no one goes into teaching to get summers off anymore. Those who do soon realize their folly and quit. The rest of us got into teaching to make a difference.
But every teacher soon realizes that we've seen too many teacher movies, and making a true difference is nearly impossible. The only movie that comes close to the truth is Dangerous Minds, where a few students are motivated to graduate; another becomes pregnant, another murdered, etc. The truth is that being one of six teachers for forty five minutes a day for a single year only provides so many resources for changing the fate of a troubled student. The number of students a single teacher truly saves is maybe a few in an entire career. The number of students a teacher loses is in the hundreds.
Faced with this obnoxious reality, the teacher has only a few choices: Quit teaching, continue teaching in a state of bitterness and malcontent, engage in some brutal triage where we give up on kids who are "too far gone", or think hard about what we can accomplish with each child and pursue that as passionately as we ever did.
So what is a realistic amount of difference a teacher can affect? As Alfred asked Batman in The Dark Knight, what are your limits? I calculate it at about 1/48th. 48 is the number I estimate as the number of significant influential adults a child will encounter before the age of 18. Now, that's a very rough estimate and isn't really measured on a per-person basis. Their parent's will have much more influence than 1/48th; many adults they encounter won't even reach 1. A really good teacher in optimum circumstances can pull of 3/48ths. But generally 1/48th is a minimum that every teacher should attempt to accomplish with every student.
This is important, because so many teachers break their own hearts and their will to teach by expecting more of themselves than that. I've been one of them. Without realizing it, we are expecting ourselves to be 48/48ths of the influence the child needs to succeed, making ourselves the compensators for the failure of the other 47. This is an unfair thing for a teacher to expect from himself.
My 1/48th may not be enough to keep this student out of jail, in school, away from drugs, on the road to college, unimpregnated. Not if those other 47 aren't doing their jobs. No teacher can be 48/48ths. So what can I do?
I can do my 1/48th. Not because it will change things. Not because it might just be the 1/48th that pushes that child in the right direction, although it might. But because it's my job. Because I've committed myself to making a difference in the lives of children. And that commitment requires no less than 1/48th. For every single kid, every single time.
The truth is that nowadays almost no one goes into teaching to get summers off anymore. Those who do soon realize their folly and quit. The rest of us got into teaching to make a difference.
But every teacher soon realizes that we've seen too many teacher movies, and making a true difference is nearly impossible. The only movie that comes close to the truth is Dangerous Minds, where a few students are motivated to graduate; another becomes pregnant, another murdered, etc. The truth is that being one of six teachers for forty five minutes a day for a single year only provides so many resources for changing the fate of a troubled student. The number of students a single teacher truly saves is maybe a few in an entire career. The number of students a teacher loses is in the hundreds.
Faced with this obnoxious reality, the teacher has only a few choices: Quit teaching, continue teaching in a state of bitterness and malcontent, engage in some brutal triage where we give up on kids who are "too far gone", or think hard about what we can accomplish with each child and pursue that as passionately as we ever did.
So what is a realistic amount of difference a teacher can affect? As Alfred asked Batman in The Dark Knight, what are your limits? I calculate it at about 1/48th. 48 is the number I estimate as the number of significant influential adults a child will encounter before the age of 18. Now, that's a very rough estimate and isn't really measured on a per-person basis. Their parent's will have much more influence than 1/48th; many adults they encounter won't even reach 1. A really good teacher in optimum circumstances can pull of 3/48ths. But generally 1/48th is a minimum that every teacher should attempt to accomplish with every student.
This is important, because so many teachers break their own hearts and their will to teach by expecting more of themselves than that. I've been one of them. Without realizing it, we are expecting ourselves to be 48/48ths of the influence the child needs to succeed, making ourselves the compensators for the failure of the other 47. This is an unfair thing for a teacher to expect from himself.
My 1/48th may not be enough to keep this student out of jail, in school, away from drugs, on the road to college, unimpregnated. Not if those other 47 aren't doing their jobs. No teacher can be 48/48ths. So what can I do?
I can do my 1/48th. Not because it will change things. Not because it might just be the 1/48th that pushes that child in the right direction, although it might. But because it's my job. Because I've committed myself to making a difference in the lives of children. And that commitment requires no less than 1/48th. For every single kid, every single time.