A MiddleWeb Blog
I have been thinking a lot about chiaroscuro.
If you want an in-your-face experience of chiaroscuro, google a really good reproduction of Girl With a Pearl Earring by Vermeer, or The Night Watch by Rembrandt. You’ll see it immediately: how the lighter portions of the painting (the earring, the captain in light yellow) play with the deeply shaded aspects surrounding them.
Educators – including me – are full of chiaroscuro.
It seems obvious, maybe, because we tell our students this all the time: we all have strengths and weaknesses, places to grow and places we glow, etc. etc. etc. Yet in this current moment, where polarization is the zeitgeist and black/white thinking dominates, I think it might be worth a concrete reminder.
The pressure to cull
It certainly seems faster to write our colleagues off if they struggle with some critical skill set. Who has time to deal with that? One writer calls this “culling versus surrender.” Culling is the process of deciding (too) quickly what is or isn’t worth our energy: the kid who continues to be late to class despite multiple detentions, for example, or the teacher who never, ever reads their emails carefully (or at all).
The deficit atmosphere in schools – our unsustainable workloads, lack of resources, minimal supports, terrible pay – contributes substantially to culling. When everything around me seems designed to ineffectively suck up any time and attention I have, I get very persnickety about who gets the tiny amounts of time and attention I do have.
What this also does is leach away any empathy I might have for flaws and imperfections in others. When I have 200-plus exams in two grade levels to grade by 3 PM, and no one is here to help me because my entire department has taken the last day of midterm week off because there are no classes and they don’t have to write sub plans… and no one coordinated with one another (this is a true story from a fellow teacher), I’m not inclined to be empathetic.
In fact, I might “cull” my department from my respect completely, and for a substantial time. There’s a long-term cost to culling that is, ironically, the exact opposite of “efficient.”
Life isn’t a single lens
In the past few weeks, though, I’ve been privy to very different stories about exactly the same colleagues, and it has reminded me forcefully of chiaroscuro. Dark and light. Consider the following:
- A novice teacher struggles with their pacing (extraordinarily fast) and clear communication while teaching. But when they are calm and grounded, they are funny, thoughtful, and fully attentive to the students.
- An administrator is regularly caustic and brusque in his verbal approach to staff. But he is an equity warrior, constantly going to bat for students who speak another language, are unhoused, or otherwise struggling.
- A veteran teacher misses an email about proctoring an exam in a grade level she doesn’t teach and blows up at the principal. In all other respects she is a pillar of the school community, running multiple programs and pouring her personal time into her work.
- A smart, ambitious teacher going for her Ed.D. in her spare time always shows up to her lunch duty late. When she is there, she does not enforce any lunch behavior guidelines.
- A teacher is terrible at paperwork and rarely if ever documents her learning goals or communication with families. However she has superb relationships with students: they greet her in the hall, stay with her for lunch and after school, and do work for her when no other teacher can get them to do so.
Chiaroscuro isn’t just a painting technique. It is art reflecting life: the reality of being human. It is also, for me, a way to remember that the stories of my colleagues, and my own stories, are always incomplete when I read them through a single lens.
There will be dark; there will be light. The dark and the light will exist at exactly the same time. Our job as educators is to make the best of both.
Images: Wikipedia. Public domain.
