#43. Teachers and You

New year...still you.

Sep 04, 2023

Hi everyone,

I hope you’re having a fun and restful Labor Day Weekend (shout out to labor unions, as always). I’ve been mostly enjoying various celebrations for my wife Maris’s birthday, which is tomorrow. Because our extremely charming and incredibly creaky old pug Bizzy requires a lot of attention, and it’s harder to book a dogsitter for a holiday weekend, we’ve taken to staycationing over Labor Day and going to restaurants that are usually too popular to attempt entry, and generally takin’ ‘er easy. I love this tradition!

Also, speaking of labor—and when am I not, lately—I spent last Wednesday morning as part of a Writers Guild of America contingent at LaGuardia Airport at a rally for the American Airlines flight attendants’ union who just voted with 99.4% approval to authorize a strike should their negotiating committee decide that it’s necessary. Hopefully they get a fair deal ASAP!

I’ve had a busy week outside of union and Maris’s Birthday stuff too. Let’s do another little speed round of all those things for anyone interested:

I’m back on
Anne Helen Petersen
’s excellent podcast Work Appropriate talking about professional ruts and how to get out of them. Goodness knows I’ve been there before!
My friend
April Wolfe
and I chatted for her extremely wonderful craft newsletter about writing jokes. I talked a LOT more trash than I usually do in public settings.
I talked Celtics basketball with John Karalis on the Locked On Celtics Podcast.
I’m back on the most recent installment of The Gargle with Alice Fraser and Caitlin Cook goofing around about some silly news stories.
I also went to Ann Arbor, Michigan to record an episode of Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me at the beautiful Hill Auditorium. I was on the panel with Helen Hong and Roy Blount Jr. who are both hilarious, and the celebrity guest was Bob Seger who was leaning against his car ripping a butt (smoking a cigarette*, for people who didn’t grow up in Massachusetts) when I met him before the show. I got to see host Peter Sagal ask Bob Seger in real time whether he knew about the legendary “working on my night cheese” joke from 30 Rock. What a treat! And yes, for anyone wondering, I did go to Zingerman’s deli where I got the best turkey reuben of my life.

Roy Blount Jr., Helen Hong, and me at the Hill Auditorium. — I’ll never stop wondering what Roy was looking at when this picture was taken. Photo credit: Helen Hong.

This week (9/8-9/9) I’m BACK in Michigan doing shows at the House of Comedy in Detroit!!! Come enjoy some jokes!

*Segerette?

AN ANNOUNCEMENT

I’ve got some bad news and some fun news, but unfortunately they’re for different people. The bad news: I have to postpone my weekend of shows in St. Paul. Hopefully it won’t be too long a postponement. I love the Twin Cities (both of them) and can’t wait to return!

The fun news: It’s because I’m doing a handful of dates opening for John Oliver in big-ass theaters! John’s usual opener, the extremely funny Brooks Wheelan, is going on a tour across Alaska and filming a special there, and I’m filling in on John’s shows in Hartford (9/16), Philadelphia (9/17), Milwaukee (9/29) and Bloomington, IN (9/30). Obviously, John (my old boss!) is one of the funniest people alive, and I’m so psyched for these shows!!! Then, the first weekend in October, I’m doing a couple of theater shows with the Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me Standup tour, which features a bunch of Wait Wait panelists doing their regular standup act! Those dates will be 10/7 in Cincinnati and 10/8 in Indianapolis.

Ticket info!

Come see me tell some jokes (but not full headline sets) on these shows in beautiful theaters! And if you’re in Alaska, go see Brooks!!!

PEP TALK FOR TEACHERS ON THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL

A cute little "first day of school" blackboard image. — This graphic has too many fonts to mimic writing by hand, imo!

So much of our back to school discourse is focused on students, and with good reason, the children being our future yadda etc. yadda etc. And, obviously, school is mostly for the kids. They often outnumber teachers in ratios that are not ideal for learning and would be absolutely catastrophic for a soccer match. Schools ostensibly teach them things they need to know to be adults, except for in Florida where schools apparently exist as holding pens for children where they are protected from learning facts about the outside world.

Core to the education of children are you, the teachers. Unfortunately, American society prioritizes teachers the way I prioritize my physical health: A lot of lip service to their importance, but almost no tangible effort towards acknowledging their value.

Readers may not know this, but I used to teach Pre-K full time. I loved my job! I had amazing co-teachers! The kids were hilarious and sweet. Still, the beginning of the school year brought with it a twinge of: “Here we go again!” Each class was unique with its students’ personalities, strengths, and challenges. But every September felt a little like spinning a record backwards and starting it from the beginning. I imagine I wasn’t alone in that feeling, considering how under-resourced many teachers are and the new bad faith constraints on what they’re allowed to teach in many places.

To those teachers (and the ones who through some miracle of brain chemistry start each school year with a full tank of hope) I would like to offer some words of encouragement: What you’re doing makes such a huge difference whether you can feel it or not. It’s easy to notice when you’re struggling, when a defiant little twerp ignores your assignments to an degree that feels like they WANT you to feel bad about it, or when you find yourself teaching to standardized test requirements rather than real world utility. It’s much harder to notice when a kid finally remembers the Pythagorean Theorem (and maybe even how to use it) or what a constitutional democracy is or even how to pour milk from a pitcher into a paper cup just once without spilling literally the whole thing on the floor every day at lunch (speaking from my own teaching experience on that last one).

Or maybe, you do notice the progress, but emotionally it’s harder to cling to those moments. You will never get every student to understand every concept. But you will always, through effort and experience, give them all something. Maybe you’ll instill a love of reading in one. Or maybe you’ll abate another’s hatred of math. Or maybe you’ll help a student feel like who they are on the inside is a good and valid thing to be, even if many forces in the world tell them otherwise. Or they’ll come away knowing that a polar bear’s skin is black to absorb heat. Something!

There will always be students with circumstances beyond your control that make it difficult to connect with them and inform them in meaningful ways. But in ways you can and can’t realize, you’re giving skills and perspective to the students in front of you that will help them live in the world, and occasionally putting a useful amount of terror into a kid that deserves that.

Every day, you’re adding wrinkles to the squishy, malleable brains of our youths. What you do matters for better and worse, but mostly for better. Even (especially!) in Florida!

(Also! Readers! If you have a few bucks to spare, maybe throw some money towards a wishlist or a DonorsChoose page for a teacher!)

PEP TALKS FOR READERS

I’ve done some condensing of these messages as is my custom, but the intent of each remains the same I promise!

Hey Josh! I'm a school teacher who took most of last year off from teaching to work on my mental health and sobriety. I felt a lot of shame when I first went on leave, but I'm over 8 months sober now and feel so much happier and healthier. I'm so grateful I had the time to take care of myself, but I'm returning part time to teaching this fall and I'm nervous. I love working with kids (I teach math & science to junior high students), but it is emotional and challenging work, especially these past few years, and I'm anxious. I worry about doing a good job, facing students and colleagues I "abandoned" when I left suddenly last year, maintaining my recovery, and relapsing. I'm excited too but nervous about what I may learn about myself, like maybe this work I thought was my life calling is something I'm not actually cut out for?
Even typing that out was therapeutic so thanks!!
- A Class Act

See above.

JK! That’s not all I have to say to you! I mean, do see above, but there’s more too. The corollary to how important the work you do as a teacher is the fact that you deserve to care for yourself despite (because of?) how much energy you devote to your students. Teachers are people, which is a fact that kids maybe can’t quite absorb and adults often forget too. People are good at some things and bad at other things. Kids don’t know this because to them all adults are superheroes-slash-monsters depending on the day. Adults lose sight of this fact because they often want you to be machines perfectly calibrated to educating their specific children at all times.

Well guess what! You’re a person! You’re made of flesh and blood and sometimes a little bit of metal or synthetic material it takes to hold our squelching carbon-based forms together! You’re eight months sober and counting (congratulations)! You’ve got things you’re great at and things you’re not great at and that’s fine. We don’t expect our lawyers or car mechanics or veterinarians or exterminators to be experts at every single thing every day of their lives. You need days off and coping mechanisms, and sometimes you need to learn new coping mechanisms with which you can fill your days off. This isn’t letting down your students and colleagues, it’s showing up for you, a person you have to see every day, no matter where you work!

It’s hard to imagine that maybe you’re not the superhero you’re told you must be to do this job. But you’re going to do the most good you can with the capacity you have! And that’s plenty of good, even if you have to take breaks for your own health. That’s fair to you, as a person. And it’s certainly better for the world than being one of those guys who works 80 hour weeks building an app that lets health insurance companies deny claims with a single click.

Hi Josh! I could use a pep talk. 4 weeks ago I went for a nice hike in the mountains here in Tucson to get some exercise and out of the heat. Fifteen minutes in, I slipped on some loose rock and fell on my right leg and caused a spiral fracture of my tibia. Ouch! I had to have surgery to get a titanium rod in my shin and I’m laid up at home and using a walker for the time being. I have another couple of months of rest and rehab ahead of me. While my two cats are thrilled that I’m always laying in bed for them to snuggle, I’m getting bored and stir-crazy. Please help give me the motivation to keep my spirits up and focused on the goal -to use both my legs again for fun stuff like walking and standing. Thanks!
- Lo-J

As my sister, a physical therapist, always says: Do your exercises!!!

Aside from that, though, you’re in a tough period of your life, but the toughest parts will end and you can make them end through effort but also patience. That’s a hard combination. You want to DO the things that will fix your body, but also those things are EXHAUSTING and don’t even show results right away. That doesn’t seem fair. And guess what? It’s NOT fucking fair. This work is not something you asked for nor is it something you could have anticipated. And yet, you have to do it!

Well, you’re free to not do it! You can simply serve as cat furniture, or if things get increasingly desperate you could cover yourself in tuna and hope your pets devour you entirely. But that doesn’t seem like what you want! What you want is for the work ahead of you to be done, and that will happen, but you’ve got to do it first. And you can! And you will! Because you want to reach high shelves and take the bus and hop over puddles again!

Then, once you do it, it’ll be done. That’s the best part of doing things. You don’t have to do them anymore.

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
The Apples in Stereo - “7 Stars”

Sometimes it takes me a week for the pick-me-up song of the week to catch up to the rest of the newsletter, and this is one of those times. After talking with the folks behind the Elephant 6 documentary 10-ish days ago, I dove back into this Apples album from 2007. “7 Stars” isn’t as peppy as “Can You Feel It?” or “Energy,” but it’s my favorite and it’s still a bright bouncy addition to any playlist. It also does the very Apples In Stereo thing of including a bunch of disparate effects and elements that magically (mathematically?) add up to a perfect pop song.

There are also great new albums by Jeff Rosenstock and Speedy Ortiz out this week, but I’ve made those artists the song of the week in the past few months, so you’ll have to listen on your own time (which I recommend)! They’re both on tour too so go see them live! Buy merch if you have the cash! Support artists! You know what’s up.