Teachers are a resilient bunch.  The entire profession is full of people who believe that if you’re given a lemon you make lemonade, because, well, they have to on a daily basis.  Not enough equipment?  Beg, borrow or buy it yourself, but teachers make it happen.  Too many kids in a classroom?  We make it work.  Another staff or committee meeting?  We provide snacks to placate ourselves and make the meeting bearable.  Could explain why the clothes are getting tighter.

Teachers even try to outdo each other when it comes to lunch and bathroom breaks.  Who am I kidding – there are no bathroom breaks.  There is that 30 seconds where you realize you could actually dash across the hall since you’ve got the room set up for the next class and they’re not there yet.  I’m not speaking from a grade level classroom point of view, so maybe another teacher there can cover while you run.  But in my world where the closest teacher is probably teaching kids how to spike a volleyball, I just can’t ask him to suddenly develop x-ray vision and see through several walls to watch my kids while he’s doing that.  So I make the dash.  Or I wait.  And this is where we start trying to outdo each other.  “I didn’t get to use the restroom all morning and just barely made it to lunch”.  “Oh yeah?  Well, I made it all day”.  Seriously people, this is not healthy.  It’s barely human.

And then we brag about how fast we can inhale lunch.  If need be, I can seriously stuff down a sandwich, chips, fruit and my pudding cup in 10 minutes.  Of course, my stomach is a mess now, and I won’t be able to use the bathroom until after school, so it will have to wait.  I’ll have something else to brag about later. We even go to workshops and other day long meetings where the speaker says things like, “do we really need 45 minutes for lunch?  We can get back to business in 30, right?”.  Of course 30 sounds like a bit of paradise.  We laugh about it and, like it’s a badge of honor say things like, “of course, let’s do it in 20!”.   Don’t you want to be a teacher?

All of this is done, of course, in the name of keeping everyone on a schedule so we can fit in all the mandated stuff the state and district asks teachers to do.  It’s scripted and timed.  Except for the time needed for things like kids coming in from recess on a winter day when it takes them forever to get their boots off, their coats, hats and gloves put away, their bathroom break and a drink before they start class.  People in the central office must think kids teleport from place to place I guess.  This is why everyone is on such a tight schedule.

So, imagine my delight when I had to go to a board meeting with other educators and my day looked more like this.  Breakfast was an hour long buffet with conversation with my colleagues and time to use the bathroom before we started.  There were scheduled bathroom/rest breaks that (gasp), lasted much longer than 30 seconds!  There was a buffet lunch where we had an hour to sit with a real plate and silverware, have someone refill our glasses and take our plates AND we had time to go to the bathroom.  We started at a certain time and we ended (and I mean ended) at a certain time.  No before school or after school responsibilities.  All of our work was done during work hours.  And the amazing thing here was I felt like I was being treated like an adult.  Like a professional.

I know that there are other professions who struggle with time constraints.  I’m not sure how medical personnel do all the things they do in the hours they keep.  They’re amazing.  But I’m pretty sure we deal with as many bodily fluids as they do.

All this said to make a point.  We have chosen a profession in which we teach children and, in turn, are often times treated like the students we teach.  Creativity has been taken away from most teachers, just like it has been taken away from our students.  Having lesson plans timed and scripted for them and behavior management scripted to make sure each student is treated exactly the same (even though we’re expected to be able to differentiate our teaching???), is once again treating professionals like students.  I’m concerned especially for our younger teachers who remind me a little of Stepford Wives, repeating the company line, drinking the Kool-aid.  Those of us who have been teaching a while at least have a larger bag of tricks and can adapt much easier to situations while others just repeat what they’ve been told, hoping things in their classroom will change or get better because “research” has told them it will.  But sometimes that research leaves out the unknown, the “x-factor” if you will.  And that is the child.

So, tomorrow morning, I will dash to school, start choir at 7:45, run to the bathroom when I get the chance, inhale my lunch at my desk and stay as late as I need to to get things done.  And, like every other teacher I know, despite these and so many other challenges, I will continue to consider myself a professional educator, even if I’m not always treated like one.