I was still new to this
but not brand new,
in my third or fourth year
working at a school
with an urgent pedagogy
model, teaching bell-to-bell
and according to best practice
buzzwords, and thanks to burnout
and turnover, I looked around
the room and realized I’d become
something of a veteran.
The guy in front of the room
was a buddy, someone who’d been
in our seat just a year ago,
one of the good ones,
as they say, though on that day
I could have wrung his neck:
“Teaching isn’t an art form,” he told us.
“It isn’t rocket science,” he said.
I knew, by now, what he meant.
Teaching was a profession, a craft,
we were practitioners, blah blah blah,
at this point I’d heard it all before
though never quite this bluntly.
He was trying, I realized, to reassure:
All you newbies in the room,
he was saying, needn’t worry
nor reinvent the wheel—
just put your shoulder to it
and push, one strained foot
in front of the other.
Soon we’d be told not to fret
about class sizes either.
Rigor ruled all.
And for all I knew he was right—
about the data, the teacher moves,
the strategic and ergonomical effectiveness
of contorting ourselves into cogs.
I don’t know the research,
just the rhetoric.
Which is why I wanted
to wave my arms, zip my lips,
whatever worked,
whatever statistics showed
was the best method
for getting him to zip his own.
Stop! I wanted to tell him. Abort mission!
Reverse course immediately!
I know you think
you’re plugging a leak
but you’re fitting a tennis ball
into a tail pipe.
There’s a reason Knute Rockne
urged his players to win one for the gipper
rather than for God-knows-who.
There’s no better way to deaden a soul
than to say it never lived.
Many philosophers, these days, argue
there’s no such thing as free will.
What they don’t deny, though,
is the evolutionary advantage our species
enjoys by believing we have a reason
to get up in the morning, that we can
change the fates, ours and others’.
Cause and effect is hardwired
or perhaps hot wired
into our DNA.
I’m not asking you to lie.
I’m asking you to look.
Detach your eyes from your slide show
and fasten them to our faces.
You might think you’re letting
us take a deep breath, but we’re hearing
you say we’ll need to hold it
damn near indefinitely,
that, in fact, we won’t be coming up
for air again until June the somethingth .
Far better for you to stand up there
and say, in a warm, demanding tone
if you must, “You know what? Scratch that.
You’re artists, dammit.
Now go out there and act like it.”
Learn more about the author on our 2026 Contributors page.
MEJ 