Do Not Call Me an "Educator:" Professionalism is a Machine

Teaching is an art. Teachers are artists.

“Moloch” from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)

It's probably foolish to think too much about one's favorite artists, but I've never spent a lot of effort trying to avoid foolishness.

Lately I've noticed that one thing about some of my favorite artists: they’re good at more than one kind of art.

John Carpenter, for example, is an visionary writer and filmmaker whose influence on that art form (particularly in horror) is difficult to measure. But he has never limited himself to visual storytelling; his music is powerful and singular as well and his tense, pulsating soundtracks have been as powerful and influential as his writing and directing. Imagine A24 films without his influence.

And take the case of Wesley Stace, the singer-songwriter formerly known as John Wesley Harding. His career as a musician has covered so many genres and styles that it deserves a dissertation dedicated to it. Add to that vocation his incredible work as a novelist, essayist, variety-show curator, and librettist, and one can hardly believe that a single human person can accomplish so much in one middle-aged lifetime.

Frankly, it makes me feel pretty crappy about myself.

As a writer, I've worked in essays for some time and fiction as of late. It's about all I can do to muddle my way through that work. How does someone become excellent at more than one thing? Being just “OK” at one task is overwhelming enough.

If I'm being generous with myself, I suppose I did run a podcast for several years and I'm proud of a lot of what I was able to cobble together there, with just a cheap microphone and the courage to reach out to a bunch of authors and academics. Still, I never felt very skillful, insightful, or articulate, which was part of the accumulation of anxiety that finally led me to abandon the show (for now at least).

So what's my second gig?

Like I said, I've been thinking about this for quite a while and then suddenly something hit me recently.

Teaching is an art: do not call me an educator

One thing I think I do extremely well is teach English at the little college that employs me. At this point in my career, I not only have "content" to deliver, I've curated and manicured it for pretty good effect.

And as far as "performance" goes, I've kind of been on a roll, folks. When I'm teaching classes in my actual discipline, I think that most students enjoy a good bit of the journey I take them on, and they find themselves having learned something along the way.

Basically, what I'm saying is that, now that I think of it, what I'm doing as a teacher qualifies as an artform. I've been working on my second craft all this time, I think.

Yet, even as my fingers fly across the keys that punch these words out, I'm imagining the pushback, the reaction to reign it in and fall back on the reliable, measurable structures of "professionalism." We are educators, after all.

Actually I am not, thank you very much. I hate that term and do not accept it for myself. If using the term is comforting or validating to you, go right ahead. It's a free country.

The problems with “educator”

I have two reasons for rejecting the title.

i.

First, the word "educator" carries the stench of assessment. It smells like dirty spreadsheets.

And if it bugs you that kids hate school, blame the unions all you want, but the fault lies directly in the lap of the assessors, the middle-managers whose job it is to collect data to show upper-managers that they deserve to keep their jobs. The goal here is not education, it is climbing the ladders of the professional machine we call “education.”

These people think of a class as a part of the machine. To them, it's a mechanism designed to create numbers for them to tally. I think of Moloch from Metropolis.

For me, a classroom is a collection of human beings being curious about the world together and finding ways to better grasp it. But how does one measure an activity such as this?

To me, using the title "educator" signifies a desire to manage Moloch’s efficiency. It's all machinery and it's inhuman and if this is the best we can do, we'd probably do no worse just abandoning compulsory K-12 education.

ii.

Second, and probably related. To me, education comes from within. It is not imposed or ingested from outside one’s self. Education is as much a spiritual activity as anything else. It's a personal process in which an individual assumes some agency over their own becoming.

It begins with a vision of life. That vision sparks a desire. And that desire motivates the individual to seek out the knowledge and skills and habits that help them grow into the shape they've imagined for themselves. And that process never stops (no, not even after the state’s standardized testing week is done).

What I'm saying is, I cannot educate a person. I can teach them parts of what they seek, but they are ultimately in charge of their own education. Call me a teacher if you must call me something.

Performance art

But really, how I'd like to be remembered by my students is as a somewhat mad performance artist. An artist whose schtick knocked them off balance just a bit, causing them to see a crack in the reality they'd known. Groucho Marx in Horse Feathers. Whatever it is, I'm against it.

But I'm for them, you see. Far more than I'm for the profession I work inside. I want to be a ghost haunting that machine from within. When my students conjure me with their Ouija Boards, yes I suppose I want to shake them up a bit. But when they walk away from me and I vanish back into the mists, I want them to remember how I used my icy, bony fingers to point them them to the ways they might rebuild the reality we cracked open in that classroom. I'm the magician who (eventually) helps you find out how the trick is done.

I'll let the educators and the accountants they serve figure out how to assess all that.