'What Do You Want? A Medal?'

I work in a job that appears very altruistic and giving. I handle special education paperwork and communicate with parents about meetings and their students’ progress. When people ask what I do, I generally just tell them I’m a special ed teacher — that’s a lot easier to explain.

I’ve worked in inner-city schools that are predominantly Title I, high poverty, mostly Black and/or Hispanic with one or two White kids in schools of 600 kids, and, well, you get the point.

I say this all to say I used to talk about what I do — a lot, but I don’t anymore. People tell me I’m doing good work all the time, and I’m not going to lie: I used to seek out that validation more, but now, I just do what I do, do my best, get paid for it, occasionally get too attached to the success of my students, but go home and attend to other things.

The reality is every day is filled with moral dilemmas and compromises that really make you question whether you’re doing the right thing. In my third year of teaching, one example was how strictly we had to enforce a uniform policy. A student couldn’t even enter our classrooms without a uniform on.

I knew this wasn’t the most social justice-oriented policy to enforce, but it was a rule my school took very seriously and one I could professionally get in trouble not enforcing. It would harm my career to just let kids come in with jackets and hoodies, so I enforced it. I also didn’t want to undermine some of my colleagues, who also took it very seriously. A few kids told me I was doing too much and that I was the only teacher who enforced the policy, which, as you can imagine, made me feel like a horrible person, even if I didn’t say it at the time.

I do have one friend on Facebook who talks very much about his work in the school system, in the community, and how much he gives to the kids. It’s social media, so you can only talk about how things seem rather than how they actually are. But he posts about every other day about how well he connected with this student, that student, or who he ran into in the community and his role in helping that student out. He talks about his own background that was similar to a lot of his students, and how much he gives to the work.

It is inspiring to see, but it can seem overly boastful to constantly post about your good, altruistic work on social media.

I guess one of his Facebook friends found the constant posts a little off-putting and commented:

“What do you want? A medal?”

. . .

I don’t write this to be overly critical of this friend. I’ve written about my attempts to do good work in the school system and posted about it on social media. I haven’t bragged explicitly about accomplishments my students have made, but I have humble bragged. I’ll say with the implication of:

“I know you’re really not supposed to take credit for your students’ success as a teacher, but I had one student grow from the Kindergarten to sixth grade reading level in one year.”

To an extent, everyone seeks out that validation, even if it’s not to the level of this one friend. To an extent, everyone wants a medal.

For me personally, I know my job is filled with moral compromises and situations where I believe I’m doing the right thing, but it’s not a simplistic battle between good and evil. It’s a very nuanced job, as reality normally is. Sometimes I need to be reassured I did the best I could or did the right thing even when there’s a ton of doubt.

The truth is a lot of service-oriented professions, like teaching and education as a whole, are very underpaid and under-rewarded. The lack of public respect we have as a society for teachers does seek a lot of newer teachers, especially, to seek out figurative medals on social media and brownie points with peers.

The Biblical answer is to not seek out credit for your good deeds, either. The New Testament is huge on doing good works and giving to others, but doing so in private and not in a way that seeks the credit or validation of others.

When you’re looking out for your career, however, and need to show your supervisor you’re doing a good job, the truth is there are times people are much more self-aggrandizing and boastful than they necessarily need to be. If someone wants a promotion, the truth is they’re going to have to market themselves, their abilities, and their good deeds. You’re always curating an image, particularly on social media.

You want someone who connects deeply with the kids and connects with them on a personal level, so this friend is simply doing what’s best for himself.

But working in a very public, bureaucratic institution also means there’s plenty of the CYA mentality. Show you’re doing your job and your due diligence, and make sure you show it in writing, so when someone makes an allegation that you’re not doing what you’re supposed to, you’re covered.

In the school system, allegations happen all the time. A student may accuse a teacher of not doing their job and failing them for no reason. A teacher will often point to the attendance record and point out that the student barely comes to class. The same goes between all actors in the school system, whether it’s parents, administrators, or district personnel. You can never be too careful or too covered.

This mentality is only amplified on social media.

. . .

This is to say there are people who genuinely act like they want medals. But there are also a lot of people who understand a public bureaucratic institution (and the world in general) often does not reward or incentivize actual hard work, competence, and altruism. The reality is institutions often reward the appearance of hard work, competence, and altruism.

So while people find my friend’s declaration of his good work and service to the community and his students as off-putting, this is not a fairy-tale world where you’re rewarded and paid more for doing good works privately and keeping a low profile.

On a morality and spiritual level, doing good works of service and not getting credit for it is the point, right?

But I think when people have their financial well-being and families to look out for, you can’t always act in the most moral or spiritual way. Sometimes it’s not enough to be virtuous. Sometimes, as off-putting as it is, the world rewards signals of virtue.

I ramble just to say there are off-putting ways to act and virtue signal, but there’s a reason behind it. In fact, there are a lot of reasons. I think you could say that’s just how the world works. I wish more people would do their good works in secret and find validation in the work itself, but in a profession that is often very appearance-focused, it’s hard to fault someone looking out for themselves.

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This post was previously published on Ryan Fan’s blog.

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