This piece is difficult for me to write for so many reasons. My goal is to keep it short and straight to the point. I would like to see a radical change during my lifetime in the field of education and I would like to get a honest conversation started so that my children can thrive in the public school setting.
Over the past 22 years educating children in America has completely changed from when I started in 2000. There are many reasons why, but the reality is that many teachers across the country experience trauma everyday at the hands of students, parents, administers, and even their fellow workers. It is an extremely tough job to do day in and day out successfully. We live in difficult times. We are expected to wear so many hats and to be so many things to all of the students we service. This takes an emotional, physical, and psychological toll on teachers and their families. I have left the teaching field three years ago not by choice but because I wasn't given enough time to recover from the birth of my child. I was told to come back to work immediately after 8 weeks regardless if I had leave or not.* At the time I was only able to care for myself and my infant, anything beyond that wasn't possible. Prior to that I spent my entire teaching career being a superhero and fighting and striving for the rights of students, parents, teachers, and administrators but I wasn't able to do that for myself in that season. When I needed someone to fight for me in the education field there wasn't anyone around. The fighting strength I had previously I didn't have any longer. In full honesty, I don't know if I will ever return to teaching because it is an extremely hard and difficult job, almost tearfully impossible on some days. I am the type of person who isn't willing to do something without being relatively confident that I can do it well. Teaching is extremely hard because you are expected to do majority of it alone. Educators today carrying the weight of an entire community on their shoulders and that is impossible with things the way they are in our society.
Educators need adequate rest and mental health days to do this job with excellence. The reality is that they don't get them. I spent majority of my teaching career working. I worked all day at work and I came home in the evenings and continued working grading papers, writing lots and lots and lots of lesson plans, entering grades into the computer, preparing work for the next day, contacting parents, and etc. I spent my weekends and my holidays doing the same. After leaving the teaching work force I kept hearing so much about healthy work life balance and boundaries. The reality is that teachers aren't allowed to have a healthy work life balance and boundaries. They are guilted, shamed, and bullied into doing excessively more for less in some cases.* Majority of the people who I worked with and supported during my career were women who had families. They were regular classroom educators who just wanted to teach. They were shackled by mountains of paperwork, constant unrealistic demands, ever increasing rise in discipline problems, and the lack of meaningful parental involvement made this job impossible, and constant stress. Yet we were expected to shoulder on and accept these unhealthy working conditions.* With these unhealthy working conditions teaching became extremely difficult and overwhelmingly stressful. I love my students and their families. I love the communities I serve. I love my job because for me it wasn't just a job but a calling. Majority of teachers feel the same way I do in this regard. We are passionate about what we do.
My goal is to shed some light on the current difficult climate of teaching. Most teachers can't defend themselves to the media or to parents because of gag orders and so they suffer in silence. The reality is that the pandemic provided a shift in education. Many discovered that there is a better way to life and I for one have as well. For the first time in decades I am doing things that I loved to do which is to freely write, pursue my love of music and The Arts more passionately, and to share my stories. It was like my life was on hold during my teaching career as we dealt with one traumatic event after another. It wasn't all bad. There were plenty of good times that I shared. We were a family and we still are and that is how we made it year after year. But teaching can be better.
Right now the younger generation isn't making it long term in the education field and there are many teacher shortages. Therefore more incentives and immediate changes need to be made. For example, we can start by reducing the required 30 years of service to 20 years. We need to fight for the ones who can't fight back in the media or on social media. Educators get slapped emotionally everyday when they are not allowed to express themselves honestly and when their voices and expertise are ignored on Capital Hill, in important legislative bodies, and yes even in their own communities. We must stand with our educators, they are on the front lines of defending and protecting our children everyday with their lives. They are defenseless yet they go back day after day doing a job that very few people would sign up for and they do it because they truly love their country and the children. We all know discipline problems and special needs concerns have increased and we are all experts in reading data charts and finding conclusions, and I know lots of data have been collected for the past twenty years on all sorts of educational initiatives. We need to use the data collected to make relevant and meaningful changes that better the lives of all service workers beginning with our educators and their students.
Educators are the guardians of our children and the guardians of the history of our nation. We must do better because we can. We can do better and we must. We need your support to make public schools a place of learning. Safe places for all. That begins with more mental health support in each school not just for the students but for the educators, support staff, and administrators.* We need more meaningful community support and that looks different in each community. But it begins with really listening to the people who are facing the difficult challenges everyday of teaching our American children and shaping them for a better tomorrow. It should also include using health guidelines and data that supports healthy living. We must ask the difficult questions such as how can we best support educators effectively when mayhem is sometimes the norm or when they don't have the resources to do their jobs effectively. We must ask why we are ignoring and overriding the voices of experts in the field.
January 6th should have taught us a valuable lesson on the importance of mental health education but also the importance of education and teaching all Americans, American and World History. We also learned what could happen when we fail to teach our people how to make meaningful connections to civic art and architecture and to value the people who represent us everyday.* We also learned the hard way what can happen when we fail to communicate with one another in real time and what can happen when good people are unable to assist in the process. We must support our educators with teaching the basic fundamental ideals and bring back teaching History and The Arts because they organically bring communities together in peace. We must work together to better and strengthen our communities and to keep the conversation flowing. God Bless Our Nation! God Bless our Educators!
Peace & Love.
From the desk of Esther Kamoche Robinson
*More information can be provided.
Taken by Esther Kamoche Robinson in February in Annapolis, Maryland
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