July 7, 2025

Dear Teaching, 

I anticipate you every August, like the high tide sandy shores waiting for the predictable afternoon flooding. You overwhelm me. I plan and prepare as much as I can- too much. But it doesn’t matter. Experience helps me navigate the tides, predict them. And they often still feel so treacherous. I want to breathe deep, and calmly enter the classroom. I want to move patiently and slow between pages of text and rows of desks. I want to enjoy the moments when I’m not grading, instead of worrying constantly about the stack of papers, the crowded inbox, the mailbox,  and dinging notifications. I want to take attendance one time, so that I can pay attention to the rest of those instructional minutes. Bell to bell to bell organization feels like I can never pause or excuse myself. Despite all the regimented strict-structured time there is still never enough for me. Or for spontaneous conversion. I want you to be organic, and feel less like relentless waves, and more like soft, loamy soil I can sink into.

I feel like you don’t listen to me. I give and give, and it’s often like you don’t care whether I’m here or not. Have you changed at all in the last 60 years? Have any of your partners nudged you in a new direction? Or have we all bent to your will? Accommodated and adapted to your demands? It doesn’t have to be this way.

When we are together without the gaze of the standardized tests, administrators, TIP mentors, student teachers, or graduate students, we have the freedom to just be us. We can make the rules, set the norms, and do this whole learning thing our way. It’s hard to trust you though. Relying on how things have always been is just a way of uncomfortably avoiding the fear of change. I don’t want to do that anymore.

 I’m asking you, now, to be different, to change with me, because I am different now too. 

Let’s be better, slower, more fun. Let’s not worry so much about all the policies we can’t change, and listen more to the world around us, the students, the authors, the poets. The beautiful thing about a rising tide is that it doesn’t drown the sand forever. It ebbs and flows, and gives the shore a chance to catch its breath, and try again. A great teacher somewhere said, “that the definition of insanity is trying the same thing again and again, and expecting different results.” Please. Stop the insanity. I’m going to mix it up this year. Get ready. 

Love,

Kelly