Chris Lehmann has a new post where he discusses the time demands of his job as principal of Science Leadership Academy, how he balances those with his family responsibilities, and the unrealistic expectations for self-sacrifice that are created by media portrayals of educators. Now, I follow Chris on Facebook and Twitter, and I have no idea when he switches his educator brain off to let it recharge. (Case in point – the blog post in question went up around midnight.) So if he’s saying there need to be limits, someone ought to listen.
I also think it’s worth it to zoom out from the school issue a little – is there any profession where the work doesn’t expand to fill all your available time plus, let’s say, 10%? There’s always that one-more-thing that we would like to do if we just had a little more time or a little more energy. We all have to find that line where we say “This is good enough.”
That said, I think there are two big factors at work making this the problem that Chris identifies in society at large and also within education.
1) We are, in many ways, a work-driven society. There’s very little pressure to be a successful person compared to the pressure to have a successful career. So instead of our professional standard of excellence being what you can accomplish in a 40 or 50 hour week, it’s what you can accomplish in a 60 or 70 hour week or more. So the people who meet that standard are the people who either don’t have families or personal lives to sacrifice, or who are willing to curtail the time they put into those areas. Once upon a time this was fodder for the Harry Chapin song “Cat’s in the Cradle,” now it lurks behind our discussions of gender equality in the workplace and a host of other issues regarding the balance between work, family, and personal life.
2) Society at large has so many problems, and so many of those problems have a direct impact on schools and students, that even if the most dedicated professionals like Chris found a way to double the time they spend working, it would not be enough. I think this makes it harder for teachers and educators to feel like they’ve reached the “good enough” point – especially when there are people who prefer to criticize the individuals who are already going above and beyond to try to fix the problem rather than criticize the society at large that has made the problem so daunting. Demanding that someone else fix this – without providing the tools to do so – somehow comes across as leadership. (And of course, there are educators and teachers who do the very same thing to their students or their colleagues, so I’m not saying any group is without fault there.)