There Is No Perfect Teacher

Illustration by E.K., Age 6

If you’re a teacher and want to throw yourself into an existential crisis, google “definition of a good teacher.” No less than 572,000,000 results will burst forth from the world wide web of relentless social standards.

Just like there is no such thing as a magic lecture, there’s no such thing as a perfect teacher.

Teachers are complex humans doing complex work. Sometimes the work I do is effective, meaningful, significant, and productive. Other times the work I do is fraught, stalled, unnoticed, or unsatisfying. Teaching is about assessing and responding to the context, growth, and development of the class in the moment. The hardest part of the job is knowing that those bad, imperfect, not-ideal moments are necessary to an authentic life alongside students and families. And they are not a reflection of who or how worthy I am. 

If modeling how to learn is the most effective way to teach, then those hard moments have the potential to enrich our practice rather than diminish us as teachers. If you never feel growing pains, you’re probably not growing. This process is neither “good” nor “bad” - it’s life. The worst problems arise when we start to equate the peaks and valleys of our work with our identities as teachers and people. We’ve been taught to be “good” all the time, even when the definition is unclear. We hurt ourselves when we expect not only to achieve but also to sustain perfection over the course of a career. It’s no wonder so many teachers burn out. Perfection is a shifting mark, yet we expect teachers to strive for it in every moment for the sake of the children, our field, and the changes we hope to bring to our communities. That same relentless drive for perfection can even have the opposite effect of making us insecure, rigid, and controlling as we begin to ask for that same perfection from children, families, and colleagues around us. We think, If I’m working myself this hard, why aren’t you? Perpetual goodness is a game we all stand to lose. 

So how, exactly, did teachers as a whole get so caught up in this idea that Google can serve up 572,000,000 definitions of that goodness? 

The answer is in the histories through which we understand ourselves and our vocation. 

This PBS timeline of teachers in the U.S. outlines how conceptions of who teachers are, how they should behave, and what compensation they deserve have changed.

Look at the story that emerges from these highlights: 

...From colonial times and into the early decades of the 19th century, most teachers were men...

...The advent of the Common School [in the late 1830s] significantly affected teachers and the teaching profession. The increasing number of new schools across the country demanded greater numbers of educated teachers. In order to staff the schools, communities turned to women, spurring the feminization of the teaching profession -- the entry and eventual domination of women in the workforce. It also led to the formalization of teacher training, often through Normal Schools…

...The Common School reformers seized on the idea of hiring women to teach in the new schools. They cited as women's most important qualification their femininity -- the fact that they were women. But they often added, in an aside, that women need be paid only a third what men received…

...The reformers argued that women were by nature nurturing and maternal, as well as of high moral character…

...Teachers were moral exemplars, the models and instructors of upright living.

Even as they granted women moral superiority, reformers quietly worried over women's ability to maintain order in the classroom and discipline unruly children…

...The reformers often derided women's intellectual capabilities. Yet women were becoming better educated than ever before...

... women flocked to teaching…

...Teaching gave women a window onto a wider world of ideas, politics and public usefulness. Ironically, the women teachers could effect change precisely because they had no longstanding, vested interest in teaching careers. They were, in a sense, outsiders. But they formed associations, went to summer training institutes, exchanged ideas and friendships, and unobtrusively contributed to the transformation of their communities. The feminization of teaching changed not only how society perceived women, but how women perceived themselves...

Our vision of who a teacher is has never been static. In fact, that vision hasn’t just evolved but has been intentionally manipulated by policies and workplace practices in tandem with larger societal expectations. On the one hand, we replicate the roles we see because we have experience with them. Those experiences make those paths feel possible. On the other, changing those roles means challenging whole systems of people and ideas, which is incredibly difficult and often unappreciated work.

Teaching was the path that most easily opened up for me when I graduated high school, personally and institutionally. Not so different from the women teachers of the first Normal Schools. The only people I knew with college degrees were - get ready - teachers. But it never felt right to replicate the conditions under which I was educated. Full disclosure: I hated school. My interests as an educator lie in thinking creatively and critically, in seeing the connections between people and ideas, and in educating for justice. For years, I worked in different educational settings, looking for a place where this thinking was not only welcomed but supported. It took a long time to learn that those ideas start with me and the million small choices I made in my practice each day, even when it was uncomfortable or unwelcome in the school. I made peace with being uncomfortable. I even learned that discomfort often meant I was on to something, that I had more to learn, or could be an agent of change in a school or organization. Again, not so different from the women teachers of the first Normal Schools. Oh and, in case, it sounds like I achieved some sort of intellectualized perfection - I did not. The hard work still hurts. I’ve just learned to use my personal growing pains as the opportunities they are. And I don’t hide them because I know others feel the same pain. What we share heals more quickly and effectively than the wounds we hide. 

So, if you sometimes feel that being a “Good Teacher” is a slippery slope of unceasing expectation...that’s because it is. The archetypal ideal, i.e., Good Teacher, is not and has never been one thing. The mores of the job have always reflected those of society’s dominant voices. But time moves on, and so too can we unmoor ourselves from the unhelpful and oppressive narratives of past powers.  

We can choose to rethink our role in light of this understanding and with nary a scroll through those 572,000,000 search results. Our work as educators is most effective when we give it our unique intentions, intelligence, and make decisions based on our vision of a just and meaningful world alongside children. It’s not easy, but neither is fitting into the alternative. Progress is the worthier prospect and it is a learned behavior. And hey, we’re teachers, right?