I Don’t want to do it with a Broken Heart…

What Taylor Swift Taught Me About Teaching:

For my lord and savior, Cattie Hall - the OG Swiftie and literally, the best teacher I’ve ever met.

I realize that I am most likely committing some sort of pop culture sacrilege or academic/literary suicide by invoking the name of the millennial warrior goddess. Or maybe you already disagree with me because Taylor Swift is a raging feminist, bitch goddess whose music heralds the four horseman of the apocalypse as foretold in the Book of Revelations. I honestly don’t care which side of that zeitgeist debate you sit on; but bear with me because I heard a brilliant lyric recently - just a few lines from the chorus of a song about keeping up appearances in the midst of heartbreak:

I cry a lot but I am so productive,

it's an art

You know you're good when you can even do it

with a broken heart.

It’s not just the way Swift’s voice oozes irony like she eats patriarchy and misogyny and capitalists for breakfast; it’s also that she captures, quite succinctly, the prevailing malaise and nihilism currently pervading public education - the overwhelming sense that we, educators as a whole, are collectively standing in front of our smartboards or whiteboards with a plastic smile and a script from central office, edu-taining our students, while the entire goddamn system is on fire right behind us.

There, I said it. Public Education is a three-ring dumpster-fire shitshow, and while the inept few tear down the ethical pillars of the free and appropriate public education pledged to us as a basic human right, teachers are out here making sure our children are not the unfortunate casualties of this collapsing circus tent.

If you are a laymen or new to this discussion, let me suggest a few topics for your Google research:

-teacher pay vs inflation

-homeless teachers

-educator mental health crisis

-methamphetamine and/or opioid crises in public schools

-school shootings

-education and the COVID generation

-Greg Abbott and the Texas education budget

-school voucher programs

-student violence against teachers

-standardized academic testing

-book bans

-the epic teacher shortage

-teacher quit-tock

-the privatization of public education

And as if all of that wasn’t crushing enough, the solution our fearless leaders have decided to roll with is “more is better.” More micro-managing, more rules, more procedures, more apps on your phone, more documentation, more meetings, more emails, more committees, more charts and graphs, more biased tests from which to glean more biased data, more training, more certifications, more time, more energy, more emotional investment, more, more, more.

And if your students are falling behind or getting lost in the shuffle, it’s your fault because, as their teacher, you should have done more, given more, lost more, sacrificed more, loved more.

Teachers are buckling under the pressure. Have you checked in on your teacher friends lately? If not, you should because I can promise you, they are not okay.

Recent Gallup Polls reflect that nearly half of teachers feel burnt out “very often” or “always.” That same study estimates that over 270,000 American teachers are exiting the profession each year and 43% of vacant teaching positions are going unfilled.

The best teachers I know, the smartest, most valuable educators I know are scrolling through Indeed and Glassdoor in their teacher lounges and workrooms. There is an entire cottage human capital industry built around helping teachers transition into public sector careers, and school districts are being forced to hire privately contracted educators and specialists via outside organizations because teachers no longer trust the system to look out for our interests in any capacity.

What I’m trying to say is - Baby, if you think the current teacher shortage is catastrophic, buckle up, because it’s about to get much, much worse.

Worse because the next wave of teacher quit-tockers will be, like me, the public education loyalists - the diehard, unapologetic, kool-aid drinking optimists who became teachers because of the teacher or two or three from their own public school experience that saw them, helped them, supported them, challenged them, and held space for them when they needed it most.

Others come from a long line of proud educators, women who were able to provide for themselves and their children in a time when women didn’t have a lot of choices.

My grandmother opened the one-room school house in Floresville, Texas. She put a pot of beans on the wood-burning stove each morning for the students’ lunch, and then she taught basic math and reading skills to a room full of students, ranging in age from 6-16. My mother followed in her footsteps and was an elementary educator and administrator for over 45 years. It’s in my blood.

What I’m getting at is, we, the few who are still out on the frontlines - the educators left to plug holes in the dam as bullets whistle past our ears - are the true believers.

It’s these teachers who have spent the last decade huddled in front of the copier, waiting for the storm to pass. It’s not that we didn’t see the red flags, we just naively believed it was a phase, growing pains, a sort of temporary insanity that would pass as the system figured out who it was post-COVID. We kept showing up with our smiles and our scripts, until now. Now, our collective hearts are broken.

Now, the price is too high, even for us. And in truth, I believe the majority of us are realizing that the only appropriate response to the ever-increasing demands of the blatantly politicized landscape of public education, is to give the machine less of ourselves - less of our time, less of our energy, less of our trust, less of our loyalty, less of our passion, investment, and expertise, just less.

I mean, you wouldn’t give your attention to the escalated, deregulated child, right? That’s basic behavior management.

So, you know, get out there and undermine the system with your apathy, teachers! Or, if it’s right for you, just respectfully exit the sinking ship, y’all.

But please, do not stick around to tow the party line and keep up appearances, because continuing to pretend that anything happening inside our public schools right now is “normal” or in the best interest of teachers or students is just performative posturing.

And if Taylor taught us anything, it’s that we’re allowed to have boundaries and be unapologetically honest, even if it hurts their feelings.