Teach & Serve IV, No. 13
You Know What’s Really Scary?
October 31, 2018
We make monsters out of the students who act out, the parents who call in, the teachers who challenge us. We create bogeywomen and men who haunt, if not our nights, our commutes home.
We have conversations with ghosts.
It is Halloween today and I want to write about what really scares me.
This is not a post about Stephen King books – though I have read many and they do scare me – or about the sometimes frightening state of our world today – though I can be intimidated by that, too. No, this is a post about what scares me in our schools.
I am frightened that we in education are all too often tied up in how difficult our work is, tied up by the hurdles we face and tied up by the challenges ahead. I am afraid we forget what we can do and what we can be.
It is too easy to be intimidated by the stacks of papers, by the phone calls to parents, by the impending department meeting or game or match. It is too easy to be scared of the next class, the next unit, the next technological innovation that will change how we do our work.
We can create our monsters. We do create monsters.
We make monsters out of the students who act out, the parents who call in, the teachers who challenge us. We create bogeywomen and men who haunt, if not our nights, our commutes home.
We have conversations with ghosts.
We jump at the shadows of perceived insults. We hear creaking floor boards outside our classrooms and sometimes fear the zombies within them.
In doing so, we only see the trees in a dark and sinister forest of our creation. We only see the bad. We only give energy to what scares us.
In doing so, we miss all that is good.
What scares me is how we too frequently find ourselves obsessed by what we perceive to be bad and we miss what is so very good. We miss the chances we have to affect change, to be inspired and to be inspirations. We miss the opportunities, those that are in front of us each-and-every-day, presented to us to do good in this work we have chosen.
Missing the potential of our work: that is what is really scary to me.
The days are too short. The months are too short. The terms are too short.
The time is too short. Let us not waste it.
That’s what’s really scary.