An Astounding Proposal

I wonder what education would be like if teachers were given a paid sabbatical every four years?

I was just pondering the idea after my son, who is in the fourth grade, announced that he hates to read (when what he really means is he doesn't want to read this particular book at this particular moment).

However, that announcement, after spending the day with several individuals who feel the same and are very unafraid to state their opinions on the matter, seems to basically negate who I am and what I stand for. And I don't have the energy to deal with it. All I want to do is cry, not teach my son the strategies I taught his older brother when he was in fourth grade and none of his teachers was rising to the occasion.

I have been told that one of my strengths as a teacher is my great faith that all my students can do a particular skill. They just haven't been shown the proper reason to do it yet. But today I stand contemplating the fact that maybe I should just stop paying attention to the more reticent and belligerent students that tax my soul and send them to sit in the corner staring at the back wall, while I conduct class with my more eager students. Then maybe I would be able to stand up when my own 9 year old announces that everything that I stand for is everything that makes his life horrible.

I want to shout, "My children do NOT hate to read! I am a writer and an English teacher and you are not even allowed to pretend that you have that attitude!"

I believe that graphic novels are pathways to literacy, and my son loves graphic novels, but my arteries are starting to harden, and I am beginning to want to scream, and dig my feet in, and demand that literacy be achieved by my dictates. . . And that is exactly where I will fail.

That is why I believe that teachers should be given a paid sabbatical every four years. One can only take four years of emotional attack before one begins to harden and begins to perceive all students as the same. Before I decide that I must give in to the adversarial game that so many have made the school system into: resistant students force fed by teachers who no longer believe that anyone knows the joy of learning. If we teachers had one year in which it was mandatory to sit and intellectually rejuvenate, it might keep us all pliable and remind us that we love what we are doing and are here because we (hopefully) have answered a higher calling.

I am crazy and Utopian most of the time, but it just might work