A letter arrived the other day from a dear reader, a certain Mrs. Gable from Ohio.
She’s been teaching third grade for thirty years. In that time, she’s seen more fads come and go than a Paris fashion house. She’s outlasted “whole language,” “new math,” and the brief, terrifying era of “outcomes-based interpretive dance.”
But now, she writes, something is different. Something has curdled. She no longer feels like a teacher. Instead, she says, she feels like a low-level scribe in a vast, soul-crushing bureaucracy, a new secular church devoted to a strange and terrible god.
The new religion, you see, is Data. The sacred texts are district-mandated rubrics, incomprehensible to man or beast. The high priests are the administrators in the central office, men and women who haven’t had to calm a crying child or wipe a sticky desk in a decade. And our hero, Mrs. Gable, is the lone heretic in the back pew, clinging to the old gods of a dying faith: Knowledge, Curiosity, and Reason.
Her days begin not with lesson plans, but with a bizarre liturgy of nonsense. Before a single child has sharpened a pencil, she must appease the bureaucratic deities. Yesterday’s sacrifice involved a 'Behavioral Redirection Data-Point Form,' which had to be filled out in triplicate.
The crime?
A seven-year-old named Leo had doodled a rather fetching dragon in the margins of his math worksheet. The form, in all its sublime idiocy, asked Mrs. Gable to 'hypothesize the socio-emotional drivers of the off-task artistic expression.' Was Leo’s dragon a cry for help? A manifestation of latent anti-authoritarianism? Or was he just a little boy who thought dragons were cool? The form provided no checkbox for common sense.
Then come the holy days, the semi-annual “Professional Development” sessions. Here, oracles from the District Office—or worse, jargon-spouting consultants flown in from some coastal Gomorrah—deliver edicts from on high.
They are like the medieval pardoners Chaucer wrote about, selling salvation in the form of laminated posters and three-ring binders. A few months back, Mrs. Gable endured a mandatory six-hour training on 'Gamifying the Assessment Paradigm.' The presenter, a slick 25-year-old with a marketing degree and the earnest gaze of a zealot, explained that veteran teachers should reward their students with digital 'learning badges' for completing tasks.
He gave an example: a badge for successfully not setting the hamster on fire during science class. Across the library, the teachers—men and women with master's degrees and decades of experience—traded the knowing, weary glances of prisoners on a chain gang.
Of course, the system is not the only source of madness. There are also the barbarians at the gate. We speak, of course, of the parent-teacher conference. It is no longer a collaboration. It is a hostage negotiation.
The modern parent arrives armed not with questions, but with diagnoses gleaned from a pop-psychology blog. They demand to know why their 'kinesthetic learner' is being stifled by the 'tyranny of the written word.'
Last week, a father insisted his son’s 'F' in history be changed. Not because the boy had completed any of the missing work, you understand. But because, as the father put it, the failing grade “did not align with his personal brand identity.”
The child’s complete and total failure to learn about the American Revolution was irrelevant. What mattered was his felt experience of being an A-student. What is a teacher to do? How do you explain reality to a man who believes his child’s identity is something to be curated, like an Instagram feed?
And yet… amidst the ruins, a small flower grows. It’s these moments, Mrs. Gable confesses, that make the whole farce almost bearable. The other day, a troubled student—the same Leo of the dragon incident, a boy who has been documented, tracked, and assessed to within an inch of his life—stayed after class. He wasn’t there to discuss his 'behavioral goals.' He pointed to a passage they’d read in a simple children’s book about ancient Rome.
“Mrs. Gable,” he asked, his voice quiet. “Did people really used to think like this?”
For five minutes, a real conversation happened. A conversation about history, about ideas, about how the world changes. It was a moment of pure, unadulterated teaching. It won’t appear on any spreadsheet. It cannot be quantified, gamified, or synergized. But it was the only thing that truly mattered all day.
Mrs. Gable knows the score.
She knows that tomorrow, the great boulder of administrative nonsense will be waiting for her at the bottom of the hill.
More forms, more jargon, more parents demanding victory without effort.
But like Sisyphus, our absurd hero, she will show up and put her shoulder to it once more. Not for the system, but in spite of it. She and thousands like her are the keepers of a flickering flame, guarding the last embers of reason in a gathering storm of foolishness.
God help us when they finally give up.
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