A few weeks ago, I spent an afternoon cleaning out. I’m a fairly compulsive cleaner-outer, not overly sentimental, and very much in favor of order. This particular cleaning out was hard on me, though. I knew it would be going into it, but I was surprised by the direction my thoughts took and the strength of my emotions. A little back story may be helpful here.
Teacher is a role I dreamed of having from my very early memories. I loved the idea of school, I thought teachers were the very best kind of people, and as I journeyed through elementary to middle and then high school, the dream was nurtured and supported until one day in 1997, I could not believe my good fortune at landing my first teaching job. The early years of my career were not without challenges, but I had supportive colleagues, I gained skills, and I was delighted to work with my students, always hoping that they would love school and learning the way I did.
These were the days of binders full of handwritten lesson plans, file drawers full of handouts that may have been partially created on a computer but were always supplemented with clip art (that was actually clipped from a booklet), and student work that involved glue, markers, and lots of construction paper.
When I had the opportunity in 2011 to move into higher education and develop a teacher preparation program at my alma mater, I boxed up my 14 years of hard work and carted it with me from St. Louis to Iowa, thinking much of it would prove useful as I designed and taught courses for pre-service teachers. Also, somewhere in the back of my mind I thought, “If I ever want to go back…”
Some of it did prove to be very useful, but much of it just rode out the next eight years in file cabinets, until circumstances led my husband and I to return to St. Louis. I boxed up the ‘old’ files again and added to them many more from courses and lessons from my time teaching undergraduates.
A few of those files have proven useful to me in my recent role consulting in higher education, and now as I transition into a position working in academic affairs, leading assessment, accreditation, and faculty development. And while I think a few things still hold value, I realize the time has come to let go of the files from twenty-five plus years ago.
I started going through them, emptying into the recycle bin, but reminiscing along the way. Fourteen years of handwritten lesson plan books. Countless worksheet masters. And more student work than I realized I had saved. I saw names of students I hadn’t thought of in years and remembered projects I had assigned that were long forgotten. But it all reminded me of how much fun I had working with middle school students. They were creative, and silly, and of course challenging, but they labored to produce essays, comic strips, Cornell notes, vocabulary notebooks, posters, and hundreds of other pieces of work that I was privileged to receive.
My walk down memory lane reminded me that for most of the years of my adult life I have been abundantly blessed to work in a field that I love. I’ve thought quite a bit about the privilege of work over the past two years. Like so many others, I’ve lived through the horrible experience of having my job eliminated and struggling to find work. When you’ve experienced unemployment, you begin to take note of how people talk about work. In social media spaces, some rail against the perceived banality of their jobs or what they view as unfair treatment by their employer. In family circles, some of the younger generations disdain work of any kind. In entertainment, workspaces are the butt of many jokes.
In contrast, I’ve increasingly tried to frame my thoughts about work through a Biblical perspective, rather than a cultural view, and here, my church’s recent sermon series in Ecclesiastes is instructive. In the face of multiple and competing demands, stress about the rapidly changing environment of higher ed and the nature of our learners, and the perception of the futility of our work, the Teacher can help reframe our thoughts about our jobs.
Balancing Competing Demands
For many of us who love teaching and learning, tightening budgets on campus have led to heavier workloads. The pivot to online learning and the possibility of 24-7 connection through the LMS can help us support learners who are struggling and allow us the privilege to work from anywhere. But these ‘opportunities’ also have the potential to drain us emotionally and mentally, leaving no margin for family, church, or needed rest. The flip side of this is the current cultural fixation on entertaining ourselves to death or for my generation, the perception that early retirement is God’s will for us – we should work until age 55, then focus all our energy on golf and travel. I know many a couple who have experienced deep depression after making such a change and finding that idle hands are not fulfilling.
In Ecclesiastes 4:4-6, The Teacher takes up this conundrum of overwork and underwork, stating, “Then I considered all the skillful work that is done. Better is one handful with some rest than two hands full of toil and chasing the wind.” Earlier in the lesson, he also reminds us that “there is nothing better for people than to eat and drink, and to find enjoyment in their work” (Ecclesiastes 2:24). So it seems that rather than overcommitting ourselves to the point of exhaustion or leaning to the other extreme of abandoning work in pursuit of amusement, we should pursue a balanced approach, which I believe will allow us to enjoy the work we are privileged to do. I’ve recently said no to a consulting contract, knowing that the potential income would have been a relief for my family but that the time commitment would prevent me from investing further in a women’s Bible study at my church. I believe it’s no coincidence that things I learn in my Bible study have direct implications for my role as a teacher and help me to continue to lead my students to view their dissertation work as ‘unto the Lord.’
Mulling Over the Past
Another phenomenon of our culture is the way in which many of us, teachers not the least of which, reflect on the past through rose colored glasses. I recently heard the phrase euphoric misremembering as an apt description of how we look to the past and fondly recall our history while (perhaps sub-consciously) omitting the challenges we faced. Sure, the 70’s were a great time to grow up in rural America, where we ran outside all summer unfettered by cellphones and helicopter parents. But we also ran through clouds of DDT and rubbed baby oil on our skin to suntan, and all of that has consequences.
In teaching, we may aggrandize a time when technology played a lesser part in our classrooms, and students were supposedly more attentive or skilled or whatever characteristic you may attribute to them. But I also remember the challenges of those days. Manually calculating grades for hours, carrying back-breaking loads of physical student work to and from campus in order to review and give feedback, and tirelessly working to provide remedial instruction to those who didn’t arrive in my class with all the skills I hoped for (Ecclesiastes 1:9 anyone?).
The Teacher speaks of this with the admonishment, “Do not say, ‘Why were the old days better than these days?’ for it is not wise to ask that” (Ecclesiastes 9:10). I may think ‘I would never do x, y, z – these students are so ___’ (fill in the negative attribute of your choice). Or ‘I wish these students were more ___.’ When tempted to pine for students or classrooms of the past, I want to examine the root of my discontentment and submit my thoughts about those I’m charged with teaching to better examples than me. The Teacher in Ecclesiastes doesn’t speak to this directly, but the Gospels show us Jesus choosing an imperfect group of followers and repeating his lessons for them in various ways until the disciples became the leaders of the early church. The letters of the New Testament provide examples of these same apostles laboring in prayer over the learners in the early church, reminding of them of lessons they *should* have learned and hadn’t yet mastered.
I’m afraid that if I’m spending my time wishing for ‘the good old students’ who never really existed except in the glorified past, I’m missing my current calling to serve well those students in my care.
The Scriptures quoted are from the NET Bible® http://netbible.com copyright ©1996, 2019 used with permission from Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
