I’m a shitty teacher.

At least, that’s what my students’ test scores will tell you. I don’t think I’m actually that terrible, but it’s hard to maintain a sense of positivity when everywhere I look there seem to be people pissed at me and everyone else in my profession for apparently being the cause of the racially aligned and poignantly unjust achievement gap, America’s continued failure to claim its entitled place as NUMBER ONE! in international test results, and the systematic destruction of our nation’s children’s creativity, self-expression, and right to a quality education.

And so it goes that I should probably lose my job and be kicked to the curb. Hell, I’m actually doubly detrimental in that not only am I consuming precious taxpayer money without any discernible positive outcomes, but I’m also, apparently, destroying the minds and futures of my students.

At least, that’s the case if you look at those test scores and what people say about what those make me. Talk to my students, or their parents, and you might get a different answer. Talk to the people I work with, and they’ll have nicer things to say. Sure, that’s anecdotal, and sure, of course those people are going to say nice things, but my scores still suck, and that’s hard data. It’s not cutesy, it’s not froofy: it’s cold, quantifiable facts on my efficacy as an educator, as a professional, and as a national resource. It’s TESTS OR GTFO, and, given my scores, I should certainly be considering the second half of that statement.

And I’d like to take a moment to say that that completely fucking sucks.

Not because I feel entitled to this job or anything like that, and not because I feel compelled to try and re-route scrutiny from myself by giving a list of excuses for why my scores are low.

It sucks because the scores matter so much in the first place.

And I know why they do: numbers are comforting. I’m a math teacher, and I see it daily. Numbers are concrete, unchanging, and comparable. Even my students who can’t add and subtract know and believe that seven is less than eight because there’s no room for interpretation on something so rigidly defined. The numbers we see in education — the test scores and the value-added measurements — give structure to something intangible: how “good” or “bad” a teacher is.

And nobody wants bad teachers. They’re a very real concept to us, as nearly everyone can point to their own educational experience and pull out several examples. It goes against our idea of justice to think that someone completely unqualified for a position could persist in it, and it goes against our national values that these people are, in effect, employed by us through taxes from our own, hard-earned money. Those of us with children hate that we could be putting them in the care of anyone but the best, and those of us with an eye on the future hate that children aren’t getting fair chances.

But “bad” teachers aren’t the problem. They’re a comfortable red herring because they’re something we can so easily contextualize. If students are failing and test scores are low, then it makes sense that we should look to the teachers who instruct them for eight hours a day because, well, where else would you look?

And that’s the presumption that’s killing educational discourse in this country because it’s putting teachers in a vacuum. We’re locked into a lonely position of intense scrutiny, and then we’re told that there are certain sets of numbers that establish our validity. Oh, and we’re also told that our kids’ futures are at stake and that the whole world is watching what we do, so don’t fuck it up.

But I’m starting to think that the problem isn’t me, that maybe it’s those certain sets of numbers — not that I’m an expert or anything. There are a lot of intelligent individuals and a lot of research that say that those numbers are important and relevant, so who am I to challenge and discredit that? I feel small and voiceless enough already. I’m just a lowly teacher, and an inexperienced and ineffective one at that.

I will say with certainty, however, that I do know that teaching is about so much more than how my students do on a test. I work tirelessly to make sure my students feel safe and valued in my class. I try to make sure that every student, regardless of ability level, gets chances to feel successful. I work with them constantly, all year, to build a culture where they can learn to be calm and positive. I develop their language, partly so they can access academic discourse that they’ll see later in education or in life, but also so they can learn to relate to each other without the slurs and expletives that they lean on like crutches. I praise them for their drawings. I talk to them about their weekends. I eat with them at lunch. I try to help each and every single one through the difficulties and trials of adolescence.

After all, content knowledge isn’t the only thing that students get from school. They grow up in our classrooms. They learn, in and out of our seats, to deal with emotions and frustrations and crushes, and their development isn’t put on hold just because it isn’t tested. So much of our efforts as educators go beyond the test to build our students as humans and individuals, but there isn’t really a number we can point to that demonstrates that in any comparable way.

So, when I say that the scrutiny of test scores expletively sucks, I mean it not out of self-interest or self-preservation for me or my career. I mean it because that scrutiny is condensing our definition of success, for the nation’s youth and the ones who are working to develop them, to a debilitatingly restrictive view. We’re foregoing assessment of the complicated, intangible aspects in favor of simple, impersonal, and (“most importantly”) testable numbers. And the terrible, egregious oversight in that is that so few people seem to be concerned with the countless things those scores aren’t telling us.

And right now, the only thing those scores do say is that I’m a shitty math teacher and my kids are shitty math students. It sucks for them, it sucks for me, and I feel like the only thing I can do about it is hope for a day when someone can finally find some numbers that can give some value to the everything else that I do for my students and the everything else that they learn in my class.

Until then, I guess I can choose to continue to be a shitty teacher or to not be a teacher at all.