It’s like Jenga.

You’ve got a tower of rows of wooden blocks, and the game is played by sliding out the bricks from the middle and placing them on the top. The tower gets higher, yes, but it also gets more structurally unsound. There’s less support to hold things up. And the higher you build, the more you take away from your foundation.

That’s what my school feels like. Jenga.

“Build higher!”, we’re told. And we are. We’re climbing. Slowly but surely, we’re inching up.

But we’re also watching the bricks slide out from the middle. We’re watching our supports vanish out from underneath us. It seems like every advance we make comes at the expense of something else we need. Small classes disappear so we can have more money. Work time disappears so we can have training. Art and music disappear so we can raise math and English scores.

We’re building and we’re building and we’re building, but it’s getting dangerously unstable. We’re at that point in the game where the tower is going to topple any minute now and there’s a constant and pervasive anxiety about knowing that it’s coming but not when. We’re at that point in the game where we’re supposed to keep building, but we’re having trouble finding any bricks in the middle left to pull.

And what’s scary is when I look at other schools. I’ll go to a meeting and chat with another teacher I just met, and I’ll realize that their school isn’t playing Jenga — they’re building with Legos. They’ve got a big stable mat and a big bin of bountiful interlocking bricks. Different shapes, sizes, colors. And they’re building without cannibalizing. And they’re building something that is structurally intact. And they’re building something that serves a purpose.

They’re building something beautiful — the school-equivalents of cathedrals. Meanwhile, we’re just building up. And we’re doing that because we’re told that’s the only direction we have to go.

Now, it’s not easy for them, and occasionally a spire gets knocked down or some pieces don’t fit together like they envisioned, but there’s a purpose and an outcome to what they’re doing. There’s a vision. There’s celebration of success. There’s admiration for hard work completed. We’re just building. That’s all we’re doing. Just building. Building for building’s sake.

And doing it in about the worst way possible. Jenga.

When I talk to the Lego teachers, or they hear about my school, some of them are really compassionate. “Here,” they say, “our structures sound like they’re about the same height, and you sound like you could use some help. Try out these pieces in these configurations. See if you can get a hold of these other ones. They’ve all really worked for us.”

It’s heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time. They’re reaching out, but they’re telling us to use things that we can’t. Those pieces don’t work for our tower. And we can’t even get access to most of them in the first place. Of course, we can (and do) toss whatever Legos we do come across on the top, but that doesn’t help anything — it just gives the illusion of added height. It doesn’t actually give any support where we really need it. In the middle. Where the bricks are disappearing.

Others look at our tower with contempt. They think we’re the ones who chose Jenga in the first place. They think the holes are our fault. They don’t realize that most of us got into the tower without quite realizing what the game was. And that once we’re in, and we’ve stayed in for a bit, we’re faced with two terrible options: leave, and hope someone else can fill our gap without toppling the tower, or stay, and watch plenty of others we’ve relied on for support opt for the first choice.

I don’t want to help topple the tower, but I don’t want to stay in teetering anxiety either. I instead wish we could get a bin of Legos. Build with those.

But for now, we’re stuck with Jenga.

And we’re almost out of bricks.