The Skillful Teacher

Choose Your Battles
Martyrdom is often appealing, a seduction to those who see them-
selves as change agents single-handedly fighting an oppressive sys-
tem. However, as teachers with limited resources and precarious
contracts we need to choose our battles carefully. We need to learn
when to bend and when to stand firm and in particular when to
bank our deviance credits to greatest effect. We need to realize it is
easiest to get through an apparently impenetrable brick wall by find-
ing the stones with the least mortar around them and chipping away
at those weak areas rather than by trying to push the whole wall
over. Sometimes it is best to skirt the whole wall altogether rather
than try to force a way through the center. All of us only have a
limited amount of energy after surviving the inchoate diversity of
classroom life. So you need to choose the struggles that are signifi-
cant and that contain within them the prospect of success or
progress.
A good general rule is to focus on battles that are fought over
some structural change. It’s a fact of institutional life that individu-
als come and go, but structures and policies stay the same, unless a
deliberate attempt is made to change them. And it is structures and
policies that in large measure determine how we act. Battles that
focus on the reward system are usually worth fighting. After all, the
reward system of any organization determines 90 percent of the
behavior of its members. Change the reward system and you change
the behavior. We know this truth applies to students (which is why
we spend so much time generating evaluative criteria for our courses),
but we sometimes forget it applies also to teachers. A simple change
in organizational policy can have deeper and more long-lasting effect
than hours spent trying to persuade someone to agree with your point
of view. This is why it is always worth volunteering to serve on any
committee that has as its charge the redesign of the reward system
governing faculty behavior. In this I build on two of Myles Horton’s
insights: that the point of social action is to change structures and
that systems determine behavior (Horton, 1990; Jacobs, 2003).
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We need to remember, too, that there are times and situations
when it’s best to say “There is very little I can do about this right
now, so I may as well recognize this fact and use my energies for
something I can do something about.” Or, to say, “These circum-
stances mean that I can either live with an unsatisfactory situation
or get out of teaching. So I may as well live with these circum-
stances as best I can, doing what little I can to change them, but
mostly conserving my energies for a later date when more purpose-
ful and fundamental change is possible.” Such stoicism is, admit-
tedly, not always possible and can be a comfortable rationalization
for cowardice. Sometimes there are clear-cut situations where moral
imperatives mean you have to fight a battle even with little hope of
success. But in many other situations, teachers fail to choose their
battles wisely and waste their energies by individually battling
immovable forces to achieve little other than a fruitless martyrdom
noticed by no one but themselves.