How Hard Is It? (A Teacher’s Rant Driving Him to Retirement)
Every once in a while I look around my workplace — a public school in Chicago — and ask myself a question that has become almost a mantra:
How hard is it?
Not in the philosophical sense.
Not in the “teens are complicated” sense.
I mean… literally… how hard is it to do the absolute simplest things?
Because lately, the gap between “this should be easy” and “apparently this is impossible” feels wider than the Grand Canyon.
1. The Master Calendar That Does Not Exist
Let’s start with the calendar — or rather, the lack of one.
My school does not have a shared, school-wide master calendar. That means I often have no idea when field trips are happening, when testing is scheduled, or when some random event is going to hijack half my class.
Imagine trying to run a class with structure and planning while operating in an administrative environment that seems allergic to… well… structure and planning.
And here’s the part that drives me nuts:
A shared calendar takes ten minutes to set up.
Google Calendar → Create → Share with staff → Done.
How hard is it?
Apparently very.
2. “What Can I Do to Raise My Grade?” (Asked With One Week Left)
Another classic:
Students approaching me a week before the end of the semester, asking what they can do to raise their grade.
Not in week two.
Not in week five.
Not even in week ten.
Week seventeen.
And the answer — the simple, painfully obvious answer — is always the same:
Do the work during the semester.
It’s astonishing how foreign that concept feels to many of them. We’ve created a school culture where deadlines are flexible, missing work can be made up months later, and every consequence can be negotiated.
So kids have learned that nothing actually counts until it’s too late.
But still… how hard is it to keep up with assignments as they come?
Harder than I thought, apparently.
3. Being Where You’re Supposed to Be
You’d think this one would be simple:
Be in your class, not your girlfriend’s class.
Be in Civics during Civics, not wandering into the gym.
Go where you’re scheduled to go.
And yet, every day I have students drifting in from hallways, from other rooms, from places they absolutely shouldn’t be — usually with an expression that says, What? Why is this a problem?
It’s not that the rule is complicated.
It’s that enforcement is inconsistent, consequences are rare, and many kids have learned that rules are more like suggestions.
So again:
How hard is it?
Too hard, it seems.
4. Why This Feels Like a One-Way Ticket to Retirement
The truth is, none of this would bother me if it were the result of complicated, unsolvable problems.
But these aren’t complicated.
These are the easy problems.
The low-hanging fruit.
The quick fixes.
The “we could have solved this in 2009” issues.
What wears me down — and what makes retirement look more attractive every day — is living in a system where:
- the simple things don’t get done
- the obvious things aren’t enforced
- the preventable problems repeat endlessly
- and the people who notice sound like the unreasonable ones
I’m not asking for perfection.
I’m not asking for reinventing the wheel.
I just want a calendar.
Students who do their work.
Kids who go to the class they’re assigned to.
How hard is it?
Hard enough, apparently, that I’m starting to think the answer might be:
Too hard for me to keep doing this forever.