Here's What We're NOT Going To Do

I have a student whose favorite saying is, “here’s what we’re not going to do...” She says it when projectiles fly through the room, when another student insults someone in her vicinity, or when people make dumb mistakes in following the directions. She says it in a grown-up tone that makes me laugh as she mimics some teacher who must have once had occasion to finish the line with, “we’re not going to cut each others’ hair with the safety scissors.”

Here’s what we’re not going to do. It could be TFA’s mantra of superiority. In their hands, it becomes a snobby injunction that leaves hearers wondering exactly what positive goal we’re reaching towards (certainly not continuity in the classroom—my students deserve more than two years of commitment, and I am torn in two right now that I’m not giving it to them).

Today I sat in a coffee shop with my TFA coach from this year, a tranquil man whose keen yet modest presence has mellowed my teaching, trying to articulate exactly what feedback to send to TFA after two years of solid discomfort in the organization.

“Well, my school was amazing, I learned so much there, and I loved my students, and my amazing TFA teacher peers…” I paused. He sat with the expectant air that practiced teachers use to draw forth thoughts from their children.

“I hated TFA.” I confessed evenly. “I’m so grateful for the opportunities it gave me to teach, but I hated the time-wasting, anecdotal, self-congratulatory manner of our professional developments, and the pretend humility that led to saying words like ‘thought-bucket’ instead of ‘genre’ or ‘subconscious’, and the quid pro quo use of vulnerability by telling us about family deaths or personal failings, used to drag forth our own confessions.” I paused, thanked him for his marvelous, kind, focused coaching this year, and left. But as I drove home, the litany continued in my head.

I was uncomfortable with how TFA tried to build an unnatural community of people with different values by extracting our values from us as though they were teeth at the dentist’s office. And I felt uncomfortable as a frum Jew for the first time in my life, not because of having to skip the Saturday programming and Friday night story slams and awkwardly unpacking my sandwich at workshop dinners, but because people apologized about those things as though they were some negative part of me instead of a joyous facet of my existence. We spent so much time unpacking our feelings when TFA should have been a professional setting of shared goals instead, leading to a community of equals instead of an odd hierarchy of zealots. It never felt like a professional community, and I never felt like anything other than an unruly rebel.

I think this is what the transformation was supposed to be like.
I was supposed to reach in and slide the butterflies out.
But, you know, that doesn't end well for the butterflies.

I was uncomfortable with the word “transformational,” and how TFA thrust me into a classroom armed with little more than Anne of Windy Poplars, and the sense that I ought to be transforming children. TFA doesn’t tell you what you’re supposed to be transforming them into. And once you get to know them, the children defy transformation. They are awesome and awe-inspiring, silly, cheerful, angry, curious, and could do with some pushing and guidance and high expectations. But they don’t need to be transformed into anything.

But most of all, I was uncomfortable with the ‘here’s what we’re not going to do’ attitude.

Every TFA event begins the same way. Here’s what we’re not going to do. Be boring, like those other teachers. Be reserved about our feelings and experiences. Be traditional, or overly capitalist. Be racist, sexist, ageist, elitist, nationalist, weightist. Oh wait, nationalist is okay. After all, America is the eponymous hero of our organization. If someone didn’t declaim “Muricaaaa” with an intensity that belied their ironic stance at least once before the pizza arrived, it wasn’t a TFA session. We’re Murica, but we’re not homophobic, classist, xenophobic, chauvinist, or even speciesist.

We checked that baggage at the door. Only, here’s the problem—it always left me secretly looking around, wondering whether I was being included in the good guys, or whether anyone would find out that sometimes I am boring, reserved, racist, elitist, speciesist. And only a skeptical nationalist (at least as far as ‘Murica is concerned). I live within those systems and can’t shuck them off at will. I’m not even sure I want to simply lose them, rather than come to control them. But I certainly can’t ignore them. And neither can TFA. By the end of a meeting, someone in the room had been offended. I liked to sit with the disgruntled set in the back of the room, trading doodles while half-listening to the self-righteous burble of the smug Kool-Aid.

I’d rather be aware of my prejudices than smug. Maybe I’m smug because I think I’m not smug. Or maybe I’m smug because I’m human. We’re all smug. But I don’t want to be TFA-smug. I don’t want to unite the virtues of vulnerable, data-driven transformation, or at least not under those names. I just want to teach, and I can’t do it well if I think I’m on a crusade and see my children as infidels to convert rather than knights galloping upon their own quests who sometimes need to read a letter from home reminding them that they can do it, that someone believes in them, and oh, yeah, to check the map.

Recently I’ve had the simple pleasures of skipping TFA alumni induction and deleting an email asking me to ferry hapless incoming corps members from the airport. Being able to forget TFA and focus, joyously, on my teaching, has brought me a sense of serenity. So I can say with tranquil certainty that when I receive my next TFA communication asking me to fill out a survey or watch an inspiring video, this will be my response:

Here’s what we’re not going to do.