We Broke It Together

In 2022, a majority of teachers will tell you that education is broken. It didn’t happen overnight; it came upon us slowly, and we allowed it to happen. Who? ALL OF US. Society. For the sources of this malfunction, we must look at ourselves. Can it be summed up in a sentence or two? Absolutely not. Can we pinpoint exactly what the problem is? That’s hard to do. But we KNOW in our bones that it is broken. We can feel it, sense it, experience it in our every day.

Teachers are quitting, leaving a profession that once called to us, often from a young age. Leaving the hopes and dreams we once had for ourselves and our students because we sense the pitchforks.

I’ve given twenty years of my life to this profession. I’ve made my fair share of mistakes, but I’ve seen students struggle and grow and fail and succeed. I’ve seen them love and share and bully and cry. I’ve seen joy, pain, pride, self-doubt, and everything in between.

I teach middle school, that most challenging age when independence begins to assert itself in a flood of hormones and emotions and the desire to belong somewhere. The first peek over the edge of the nest. Scary but exhilarating, that first taste of freedom brings a sense of individuality and expression to the loud halls of a middle school. Middle schools are supposed to be abuzz with the noises of this process. It’s been a noise I have loved since I walked into my first seventh grade class in 2002. 

That noise has changed, and it’s a journey into the current state that I want to explore. Why? We need to repair what we have broken, and we can only do so by taking an honest look into how we got here. I invite you to join me on this journey of exploration into how we turned our schools upside-down. I want year twenty-one to be the year we begin fixing what we have allowed to become broken.