The Courage to Teach

Sometimes entering a classroom requires uncommon bravery.

My heartbeat accelerated as I slumped against the classroom doorframe. Did she really just say that?

No, my ears did not deceive me, even if they couldn’t absorb any further word from this long-anticipated speaker, a celebrated author whose books I owned and read, receiving our school’s most prized award for alumni.

From my vantage point in the over-crowded hallway, surrounded by faculty colleagues and late student stragglers, I surveyed our school’s Assembly Hall. I may not have been able to hear any other part of her speech but sitting inside, over one thousand high school students listened in rapt attention as the famous alumna – celebrated feminist, successful columnist in The New York Times, a queer activist I’d long admired – recounted a conversation with her college counselor during her senior fall term in 1991.

“My college counselor told me I wouldn’t get into an Ivy,” she recalled, the pain of the seventeen-year-old still fresh in the 49-year old’s voice. “That I needed to apply to my state school.”

Maybe if I hadn’t been awake since 5:00am, trying to finish the previous day’s third recommendation letter. Maybe if I hadn’t met with fifteen anxious seniors over four hours two days before. Maybe if I didn’t know I’d need my mental and emotional energy for that morning’s eight student appointments remaining. Maybe, just maybe, if it wasn’t five days before the November 1st Early application deadline, I would have tried to focus, to absorb the rest of her eloquence.

But I couldn’t do it. I felt like I’d been ambushed and gut-punched – a feeling the bullied seventeen-year-old self still inside my sixty-year-old body remembers well from my own high school years. Slipping down the back stairs, the echo of her words in my mind, I slunk back to my desk.

Yeah, I thought, that’s my job: destroying Black teenage girls’ dreams.

Of course, that’s not my job. I haven’t spent over 40 years in higher and secondary education – working 60+ hours a week every autumn and spring term, my graduate degree earning more than a McDonalds manager but less than an electrician with a high school diploma – to hurt students. Nor do other teachers. Educators are some of the most selfless people I know, a character trait too often manipulated by school boards and trustees who laud the vocation but underfund the compensation.

I truly love most of my job. There is nothing more rewarding for me professionally than my one-on-one mentoring and coaching work with high school seniors. With several, I’ve made a connection that has transcended our work and following graduation, a handful have become life-long friends.

But over the past decade, work in education has become far more transactional, less about building a relationship and more quid pro quo. Too many students expect that having submitted their homework, an ‘A’ should be awarded whether deserved or not. And too many parents, having paid tuition, expect the same.

That same transactional expectation extends to my work. As a college counselor without any power to persuade selective admission committees whether to admit or deny a student, I’m viewed by many students and their parents less as an ally than an obstacle to be overcome, standing in the way of societally validated success. I’m treated either as a service provider delivering their Ivy dream future on a gilded salver or, if the expected college doesn’t materialize, a convenient scapegoat for every societal, familial, and personal trauma and shortcoming.

For some students who are Black, indigenous, or people of color (BIPOC), their perceptions and assumptions of my “power” preventing them from reaching their dreams fits into our collective experience of racism, both overt and systemic.

I get it. And certainly by continuing to do my own inner anti-racist work over the past few years, I’ve recognized that by the time that BIPOC student walks through my office door, too many white faces have told them that they’re not good enough, smart enough, or deserving of a place at the table. I hope that greater self-awareness and education has cultivated more empathy and understanding in my counseling and coaching work. I strive to speak truthfully yet with compassion, hoping that my advice both educates and supports. I may not always get it right, but every day I seek to get better and better.

But if you’re a seventeen-year-old, who will you believe?

The elderly guy encouraging you to reach for your dreams, but hey, have a back-up plan just in case? The grey-haired white male working in an underpaid, overworked profession your aspirational, overcoddling parents wouldn’t dream of you considering because, of course, “those who can’t, teach”?  

Or the accomplished alumna on the Assembly Hall stage who did get into Yale in 1992 despite her own college counselor’s advice?

The seventeen-year-old sitting in the audience doesn’t want to hear that in 1992, Yale received 11,054 applications for a freshman class of 1,350 students (22.2% admit rate), and in 2023, Yale received 52,250 applications for a freshman class of 1,350 students (4.35% admit rate). The teenager without a fully formed frontal cortex will hear who and what he or she wants to hear. Just like most of us.

The famous alumna’s comment – “My college counselor told me I wouldn’t get into an Ivy” – underscores the challenge of my counseling work: provide accurate feedback regarding the national admission landscape and individual seniors’ chances while simultaneously affirming and encouraging the student applying. Part critique (but not critic), part cheerleader – both undergirded by a compassionate honesty and directness centering and affirming the unique person sitting across from me.

I view both parts of my job to be supporting my students. The majority of them do not. For many of today’s seniors – overindulged by well-meaning parents, saturated by social media declarations that they deserve success regardless of effort – “support” means unqualified affirmation of their wants. And sadly, we live in a digital world in which a seventeen-year-old’s Instagram post trashing an educator for not offering that support might undercut decades of a teacher’s professional reputation. Maybe even their job.

I do not know who served as the college counselor for that famous alumna. Nor do I know who worked with Michelle Obama, who wrote in her autobiography Becoming how her own guidance counselor at Whitney Young Magnet School in Chicago told her she “wouldn’t get into Princeton.” I hear the pain in those Black women’s remembrances of high school, when adults you hoped would support you didn’t communicate that support constructively, in a way that affirmed the individual. I’m sorry for their pain, both then and now.

Yet I hope that with perspective and life experience, those women and their generational peers recognize that educators today are striving to do better. And maybe, with the wisdom that comes from middle age – and, for Mrs. Obama, from the experience raising two teen daughters without fully formed frontal cortexes – that maybe their own teenaged-selves didn’t hear their guidance counselor’s support, even if the concerned critique sounded too much like the criticism prevalent in our racist society.

That night, after the famous alumna’s all-school assembly, I received an email from one of my current seniors. “I know this is last minute,” the student wrote, “but I’ve decided I want to shoot my shot, and I’m going to apply Early” to a particular Ivy League school with a 3.4% admit rate. And a deadline in just four days.

Closing my laptop, I sighed deeply. I think the world of this young Black woman:  if this individual was a start-up company, I’d invest my life savings and buy stock. Vivacious personality, can-do confidence, emotional intelligence, personal poise: a future CEO or global leader ... albeit one with a B/B+ average trending upward, and a few Cs on her transcript. Highly likely to be a success in life, yet highly unlikely to be successful at gaining admission at that particular highly selective institution.

I don’t know how much the famous alumna’s testimonial might have prompted the last-minute decision. But with the words of the morning’s assembly still fresh in my ears and fatigued in body and soul after a long school day during my busiest season, I felt little confidence and even less courage to give this student the honest, truly supportive counsel I typically would offer.

So after a restless night, awake at 4:00am, I reopened my laptop and sent the student an email to encourage her to sign up for a meeting with me to review the supplemental essays due in just four days. No email of well-crafted arguments outlining the statistical odds illustrating the folly of her Early application choice. No thoughtful suggestions of other less-unlikely reaches she might consider, college where the odds might be tough but not hopeless.

No, I thought, I wouldn’t have this teenage girl think my job was to destroy her dreams.

Swallowing down my conscience and half a cup of coffee, I then began a recommendation letter that an Ivy League admissions officer, likely frowning after noting the Cs on the transcript, will spend fifteen seconds skimming before passing on to another candidate.

To be a teacher in the 21st century requires uncommon bravery – and not simply because current lax U.S. gun regulations and our national mental health crisis mean active shooter drills offer regular reminders how educators put their lives on the line daily.

To be a teacher means long hours with no overtime and modest compensation and even less respect.

To be a teacher means to be vulnerable: to parents’ criticism; to social media bashing; to tone-deaf administrative dictates and non-collegial friendly fire. To be vulnerable to society-at-large’s discounting of the passion of your life because literature, foreign language, and the fine and performing arts are all “soft subjects” that, as some Upper East Side parents and right-wing politicians pontificate, “just aren’t practical” in our outcome-driven, bottom-line economy. To be vulnerable to threatened book bans and accusations of “grooming” (both sexual and ideological) from the right, and imputations of racism, privilege, and outright abuse from the left.

To be a teacher means to be vulnerable with your heart; to bear your soul and give yourself freely because you care about your students and want them to thrive. A bravery that’s perhaps the most uncommon of all.

I admit there are days as an educator where I don’t feel at all brave. I’d like to think that it’s greater self-awareness that has come with years of experience that makes me hesitant to step forward with brash confidence; a deeper understanding that I might not have all the answers, and to question my long-standing assumptions. I worry, however, that my occasional reticence – like in that pre-dawn moment last October when I failed to speak truth to a teenager – comes from a fearful recognition of just how vulnerable being a teacher can be.

Hug or text any teacher you know. Because every day, opening their classroom or office door – whether to the next student seeking extra help or the next parent-teacher conference with demands to reevaluate a grade – requires far more courage than you might imagine.