When the Metaphor Fits: Denisha Jones' "WELCOME TO THE TEACHING PROFESSION: ARE YOU READY TO GO TO WAR?"

The metaphors we use to describe teaching say much about us. When I taught ELA methods classes at an aspiring tier 1 university on the U.S./Mexican border, often I asked my students to think about the dominant metaphor they held regarding teaching. This "Teaching is..." reflection was followed by reading from the excellent comics adaptation of Bill Ayers' To Teach, in which he explicates several common teaching metaphors and debunks them as simplistic, sometimes media-driven, even harmful solipsisms in need of critique, challenge, and refinement. 

 My own dominant metaphor does not appear in To Teach. I've come to view teaching in militaristic (though not necessarily violent) terms. My dominant metaphor is as such: Teaching is the Fight Against Ignorance.

"Welcome to Teaching, Pre-Service Student. Hope you Survive the Experience."

A warrish conceptualization of education may no sit well with many in K12 classrooms or colleges of education, but I was appreciative when I saw Indiana University teacher educator Denisha Jones appropriate the language of battle in a recent article entitled, "Welcome to the Teaching Profession Are you Ready to Go To War?".

Jones writes the article to her teacher education students, who will work with her in her eleventh year as a teacher educator. While she wants them to love the careers they've chosen, she is blunt about contemporary K12 teachers' realities:

The teachers who stay in the profession have realized that they are in the fight of their life. Teachers can no longer do what they love, what they spent years being educated to do; they have to fight for their students, their parents, their colleagues, and their selves. They have to fight against the education reformers who have never been teachers but somehow are allowed to make policies that impact other people’s children while their children go to private school. They have to fight against democrats and republicans who take money from corporations hell bent on privatizing public education and treat education like it is zero-sum game. They have to fight against a society that expects teachers to make miracles happen every day but does not respect them, value them, or pay them enough to do it. If they want to stay in the classroom and make a difference they have to fight. Because if they do not fight then they will no longer love what they do.

Teaching as fighting for that which is fair and just and against that which is perverse and market-driven and certainly not learner-driven. Teaching as a battle. Jones knows professing in teacher education in the age of corporate reform is to profess pugilistically; so too is public school teaching a sometimes seemingly unending shadow box against forces intangible and very real but apparently untouchable. 

Jones ends with a call to arms which reads more like a plead than a battle cry:

Please do not be scared off by my words and tone. I do not want you to pick another profession. I have a responsibility to make sure that you are prepared to become a teacher. I can show you how to write lesson plans, design meaningful assessments, and create a democratic classroom community. But none of that will matter if you are not prepared to fight for your profession. I hope you are ready to go to war, because we need people like you to remind us what is worth fighting for.

I encourage you to read the rest of Jones' words. They strike me as insightful, passionate, and the EXACT sort of honesty and courage needed from those who lead teacher education classes. I've long praised and tried to create "teaching it real" atmospheres in which I as the professor am not afraid to field any question about the realities of teaching and eschew strongly embedded institutional notions that I have to, for lack of better words, "blow sunshine up the assess" of my pre-service teachers to keep them in the program so the department's per capita stays strong and everyone with power is happy with the bottom line while the consumers/students are left in an "ignorance is bliss" coma soon to be challenged and most-likely contributing to the 50% attrition rate among new teachers within the first five years of their careers. 

Please, read the Jones letter. Better yet, share it with the teacher education majors in your life. She is correct to speak of teaching as a fight, and her end goal is for future teachers to be armed with knowledge to best win the fight. 

And good on you, Professor Jones, for your forthwith courage and necessary frankness.