On Ambiguity

The Deacon

Even a cursory glance at the blogs will show the struggles that our teachers go through.  The truth is, making a difference one child at a time sucks.  For the amount of effort our teachers put in, and the amount of time and money that goes into Teacher Corps, the return on investment should be much higher.  In reality, the return may be even lower.  It is rare that one of our teachers makes a life-changing difference in a student's life.  Sad, but true.  Our teachers have students for 50 minutes a day, 30 or so at a time.  That is about 2 minutes of individual attention in a 50 minute period.  For the other 23 hours that student is at the mercy of a vast system, a system located at the intersection of race and poverty and that is rigged to allow only a few to succeed (at some point I may expand on this in a separate post, but to be brief: in the past, when America [and the south in particular, and Mississippi in specific] needed labor to work the cash crop fields, cheap [free] labor was brought in, at the point of a gun.  That is capitalism.  Capitalism values profit over people.  Hundreds of years later, we no longer need a labor-intensive workforce.  Manufacturing jobs have been exported to third-world countries [for cheap labor].  Simply put, today there are many more working adults than there are jobs.  And a deep recession is on its way).  Capitalism is about winners.  And if you've got winners, than you have to have losers.  Which is fine in theory, may the best man win.  But in practice, the game is rigged to allow those who are already ahead to stay ahead, and those behind (despite NCLB [I encourage you to take a minute a poke around the official NCLB website.  It sucks]) to stay behind.  A few make it and we call those success stories, but as Dave M., once pointed out the mere fact that we refer to those few as success stories proves the system is broken.

An oft-used metaphor is of a teacher throwing pebbles into a lake, the ripples spreading out into eternity.  For the students in the Delta communities, in inner-city Jackson, in the rural hill country, school districts that have more than 95% of their students on free lunch (meaning they come from a household living below the poverty level), it's more like throwing pebbles down a well.  As I have said many times, the battle for education in Mississippi has been fought and lost.  We are simply working amidst the wreckage of a failed system.  What we do is sweep leaves on a windy day.  Coming to terms with that, realizing that the effect we have is minimal, that the system is broken, can be difficult, especially for a first-year teacher who is already overwhelmed.  If we are not making a difference, what is the point?  What is the effect that a Teacher Corps teacher truly has?  I like to use the metaphor of a sundial.  By the time an MTC teacher gets a student (we teach grades 7 through 12), the student is already well down the path to success or to failure. All we do is move the dial a few more degrees in his or her favor.  And if that is all, and if, even worse, you will most likely never know your impact (or lack thereof), why join the Teacher Corps?  Hell, why manage the Teacher Corps?  Answers in my conclusion post later this week.