Teaching: Building a Plane While You Fly it

During my first year of teaching, I had heard the job of a teacher described as someone who is trying to fly a plane and build it at the same time.

How do we read such a prescient metaphor?

Teaching is therefore impossible. Yes, if by teaching, we mean revealing to students their excellent potential, challenging them to push themselves to their limits, crafting a sense of direction with an unshakable sense of purpose, and accomplishing these amazing tasks in fifty minutes a day for five days, all while preparing kids for to spit out arbitrary factoids for a standardized test from which they derive no direct benefit, and to do all of these things for 35 + students at one time, 175+ students a year -- yes, teaching is impossible.

Teaching is a fool's errand. Yes, in the sense that teachers are expected to put together a coherent system with human beings --bodies, minds, and spirit--who if they are true to themselves will resist being made cogs in a machine, much like cats refusing to be herded like dogs or cows.

Teaching is a non-starter. Yes, because no one can get off the ground if there is nothing to fly in, and much of the time teachers are flying nowhere with a bunch of people who would rather walk, run, sit, sleep, eat, drink, move about the cabin of life in very different, yet natural ways.

Teaching is an incomplete profession. Yes, in the sense that in many schools, not only is the teacher-pilot trying to direct and build the plane, but the passengers on board routinely want to hijack the flight, and for good reason; that air control, otherwise as administration, has no sonar, no map, no vision beyond "we believe in what we are doing", and empty words with a faulty microphone which cannot reach the pilot. No communication, no support, no community, no wonder that most people never get off the ground, or really take off with young people.