#thingsteachersdo

Last night, #ThingsTeachersDo was trending on Twitter. 

Most of it is pretty mean . . . but in that way where you sigh, "Teenagers," roll your eyes, and move on. For instance, my favorite is the girl complaining that teachers repeat themselves and should "please shut up." I always have one to two kids asking about directions even though I say them three times and put them on the board. I don't want to overstep my bounds as a teacher ambassador to students, but most of us would trade our glorious souls to sweet Satan if we could say things once and have students "get it." Not just with directions but with concepts and lessons too. That would be awesome. That world would be a world most dope. So we say things more than once, and, yeah, I know it's annoying, but it's the game we have to play.

One thing that stuck out to me were the kids calling teachers out for gossiping about students.

I'm sure there are teachers who do this. There are bad teachers and unprofessional professionals everywhere. However, I can't recall having experienced gossiping about students.

That isn't to say we don't talk about students. Of course we talk about students. However, I draw a clear line between this and gossiping.

The teachers at a school cooperate, kind of, sort of. At least, we all work in the same building, sometimes the same hallway, and we all want our students to be successful. But that's kind of where it ends a lot of times. We don't necessarily have a whole lot in common. We aren't always best friends.

No matter how much I want to, my fellow Language Arts teachers will never engage me in John Cena or Hawkeye discussions at lunch. It sucks. It's awful. Clearly, my life is abysmal. 

So we're left to talk about the thing that we have in common--which is our job. Which happens to largely involve students. Everyone talks about their jobs, and when your job involves working with people, you're probably going to talk about those people. 

A lot of the time, it's positive. I have a student who failed the first semester of LA 9 last year, and it looked like he would fail the first semester of my LA 10 class this year. So when he pulled himself out of his nosedive, started working, and passed my class with a solid C (and did some awesome stuff along the way), yeah, I talked about him to his LA 9 teacher. She needed to share in that victory and know that progress can happen. And I needed to be proud of this kid to someone, and she was there to appreciate it.

Sometimes it's less positive. Look, I love working with teenagers. I think they're cool. I think they're charming and awesome. They're this amazing group of people who have all of this potential to become lots of incredible things. They're energizing and fulfilling to be around. They're also moody, cantankerous, rude, grumpy, hormonal, awkward, occasionally smelly, and frequently short-sighted. So when, say, a student flips out because I ask him to put a heading on his test before he hands it in, I might share that with my coworkers, not to be rude or to humiliate the kid, but because the alternative is to lose my temper, embarrass him in front of his classmates because clearly he's being ridiculous, but then I'm being ridiculous in overreacting to his overreaction, and now we're fighting in front of twenty people over the stupidest thing ever.

Sometimes we talk about students because we want help. When my kids absolutely, positively will not get MLA format, I vent about it with the other LA 10 teachers. But it's a cry for help. On the inside, I'm begging, pleading, "Please give me the secret. Tell me the magic words so they will come out of my mouth and the students will get this. Please. Oh sweet Thor, please!"

99.999% of the time, though, we talk about students because we care. We care enough to pay attention to them. We care enough to get infuriated by them. We care enough to get angry and excited and to have all of these big, heart-wrenching emotions about these gawky, kind-of-ungrateful people and it's heartbreaking and amazing and awesome, and, yeah, sometimes we need to share that with someone.

Recently I talked to a student's coach about how he had gotten suspended for fighting. Not because, oh my god, this is such an amazing story. But because he's a pretty cool kid with a big chip on his shoulder, and I want him to figure things out and it kills me when he doesn't make better decisions.  

What I am getting at is that, yes, teachers talk about students. Pretending otherwise is false. But we don't gossip, not in the way I think these kids on Twitter mean. Because we don't care who texted who or who was talking to Cindy after the basketball game or how Tommy has broken up with Gretchin only to get back with that hoe Daniel AGAIN and oh my god did you SEE what Latoya was wearing? I know those are big deals to our students, and we do care about them in that we care about things our students care about. But once you get to be a grown up, which most teachers are, all of that teenager minutiae is boring and inane. Talking about it with other grown ups just makes us feel embarrassed that we were once like that, no offense to students.