Saturday was my first day in the classroom in a long time. Strictly speaking, it was the closest to being in my own classroom, to being a "real teacher", that I'd ever been, in the sense that I had two classes of my very own (DOE teachers, you can roll your beady little eyes right back into place).
I was literally wailing into my balled fists at our kitchen table Friday evening, in despair over my job search, when the assistant-director of one Ivy Something -- a private test-prep school that pays its teachers in cash and prepares the children of Bay Ridge to dominate their undisciplined Kaplan-attending peers -- called me and asked me to show up at 1:00 pm the next day.
It was amazing.
Evidently, I will need to be clamping down on my students leg-twitching and holding my ground when it comes to eating between sessions, but: amazing. Even though my teeth were literally chattering by the end of the SAT course (according to The Understood Rules of Teaching, teachers dress "decently, if not elegantly"; I suspect my puffy jacket with the unidentified white powder smeared across the back qualifies as neither), even though it seems that the all-male 7th grade group is not yet ready to deal with the word "aversion".
I spent the rest of the weekend wishing I were still there. There's this line in one of the Weetzie Bat books, which I had all but memorized by the end of tenth grade, where the amazing Francesca Lia Block describes a group of dancers running through the city, looking "like their feet hurt but they don't care because they've been dancing". Which has always been how I feel when I get done teaching, even back when I was teaching the little Blairs and Chucks of the city in their claustrophobic penthouses.
This is why I take the unskilled and indifferent teaching faculty at my nursing school so personally. My mind is blown by a life that encompasses both nursing and teaching nursing, let alone teaching nursing to the kind of eager, mildly insane students who comprise our class. For any given exam -- even the ridiculous Community Health exams, with their questions about whether believing in the evil eye constitutes magical, religious, or magico-religious thought -- at least two or three of us will produce and share a thirty-to-forty page outline detailing the reading assignments, preprinted lecture slides, and any half-hearted contribution made by the professor as she sleepily scrolled through them. I regularly attend study groups where I show up at eight am, leave at six pm, and am neither the first to arrive or the last to bail. Your typical college professor would be at a loss regarding which of us potential pets to adopt.
I worked in charter schools, after-school, and ed reform long enough to have internalized their party line: that what one does always matters enough to do it really, really well. That it is your job to do it really well, well enough that it actually works -- that your students learn, that they pass their tests, that you have something tangible to hold up and say: lookit, I did my job.
I believe that this set of beliefs is even more critical for nurses to have. People will suffer less, and die less, if those charged with their care treat that care like its importance is both paramount and non-negotiable.
Honestly, by the end of my last clinical rotation, I'd pretty much lost any sense of that. I was annoyed that no one seemed to care whether I was learning, that our professor started class at fifteen past and showed up late and disoriented to clinicals. I was sick of being treated like I'd done something wrong by wanting to learn and do well. A spoiled student my first time around, I was used to professors talking to me like I was valuable and interesting, like I had the potential to do many excellent things and they were happy to help me do them.
I don't know why those nurses who choose to train other nurses seem to resent and dislike their students so much; presumably no one is forcing them to accept these jobs and the checks that come with them. But I do know this: no matter what insipid drama is going down in the classroom, on the class mailing list, in the locker room where we pre- and post-conference, what I do for my patients always matters enough to do it really, really well.
This inexplicable privileging of excellence for its own sake is not the norm in nursing, however many classes we have to take on Healthy People 2020 (or 2010; what, you thought someone would update the slides?) At least, it's not the norm among the nurses training us or looking to give us jobs (or not).
So my first Understood Rule of Nursing is this: Even if no one around her cares -- even if they appear threatened or outraged by the fact that she cares -- the nurse cares about everything she does.
No one's going to make me do my job well; no one, it seems, can be counted on to care whether it's done well or not. Being an excellent nurse may not even be an advantage in getting a nursing job, as I had assumed it would be.
But: do it well anyway. Care anyway. Be excellent anyway.
There's nothing a boss or professor -- even the best boss or professor -- could give me as motivation, that I can't find a way to give myself.
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