Background

Teaching today is hard. As if it hadn’t already been before, it is even more so today. I am sure you are familiar with the statistics. Teacher retention is low; teachers and staff are underpaid; raises often don’t keep up with inflation; teachers are working two or three jobs to make ends meet. While salary and staffing trend downward, teachers are expected to do more with less, collecting more data to inform decisions, differentiating and individualizing instruction, curricula and materials creation, forgoing lunch or bathroom breaks to address student behavior, or responding to parent emails. All of these factors leave teachers and administrators grasping for air. We hear it in the profession, the importance of self-care, taking time for yourself, avoiding teacher burnout, but in today’s profession that self-care can be the elusive unicorn. Though, I would say that the Gerry Brooks videos on Facebook are that unicorn.

Even outside of school, we hear comments like “Teachers shouldn’t complain; they have the whole summer off” or “If I don’t get a raise, why should teachers get one?” or even, “My tax dollars are being wasted on fluff.” We are finding ourselves having to justify our jobs to the public, when most others have the luxury of not having to do so. We live in a time when respect for teachers is at an all-time low, and equally problematic, the value of education is not necessarily measured in the intangible personal and societal benefits that an education provides but rather in economic terms: the cost per pupil, the payroll cost of the district’s budget. Take those ‘fun facts’ that teachers are painfully reminded of through emails or comments here and there, the monthly cost of payroll, for example. Despite their intentions, the subtext can be interpreted to say, “teachers, you cost us a lot”—a message that becomes internalized reinforcing low morale and self-worth—. Sadly, some might have us believe in today’s society that public education is a drain or burden on society rather than a fundamental pillar that helps ensure a bright future for all.

We can all agree that safety, protection and well-being is one of the most important needs, and looking at the U.S. government’s 2016 budget for military spending of 612 billion dollars, some might argue that the budget reflects that belief. When we look at the federal budget for education in the same year, the budget is nearly a tenth of what the defense budget is at 68 billion dollars. Yet, what we hear on a national and local level is that the cost of education is too much, implying that the one dollar the federal government spends on education for every 10 dollars on protection is somehow not worth its value. We can debate that ratio, but my point is that an effective education costs money, just like effective defense and protection. Both help ensure a bright future.

Do some of these positions resonate with you teachers, para-educators, support staff, and administrators? I might venture to say it does.

I also am in the teaching profession. I teach Spanish at a small university in the Midwest. Like PK-12 public educators, college and university instructors hear similar message across their institutions, particularly those in the humanities. In a time where financial and economic narratives and questions seem to be the logic by which everything else should abide, the student becomes a customer, the major is tied to earning potential, courses and learning outcomes are measured by their value added, the concern becomes over the number of seats occupied in the classroom. Even as a language teacher, we have seen an emphasis on the instrumentalization of knowledge. Rather than learn the language through literature, the language is learned through the context of professions, that is, Spanish for the professions. While these courses make complete sense, should they replace the literature ones? Should literature classes be relegated to a second tier due to their perceived lack of value added?

In a time where discussions in the humanities revolve around the questions “Do the humanities matter?” or “Why the humanities matter?,” today, for those of us in the humanities, we are tasked with the discipline’s defense. In my view, waiting for college students to make that defense may be too late. Students already have largely been shaped by their PK-12 education and teachers. Just to give an example, most of my students who end up being Spanish majors share that they want to study Spanish in college because they had a great teacher in high school.

Thinking with the term “flash fiction,” I call my endeavor “Flash Humanities” because my goal is cover relevant topics in a short amount of time, trying to condense a course-worth of ideas and materials into an hour, half-day, whole-day professional development workshop or interactive presentations. The topics and concepts are rooted in the humanities and dialogue with current (and hopefully relevant) topics and issues in education.