51ÂÜÀò

My View

During our school district’s annual administrator retreat last summer, we conducted an impromptu, brief social media experiment. We created a quick list of five common professions (doctor, nurse, lawyer, social worker, teacher). Then we typed each profession into Google and asked that it be tagged with memes, internet images representing each field of work.

As expected, each profession yielded an infinite amount of content, but what we found most disheartening was the disproportionate number of illustrative memes that captured our beloved profession of education in less than appealing ways.

Granted, humor and hyperbole tend to be the main ingredients when one is crafting a meme, but after two or three scrolls, it was impossible to find a representation that glorified or, at the very minimum, didn’t portray teaching as something quasi-horrific in nature. Instead, teaching was mostly shown to be a profession that causes accelerated aging, yields pauper wages, contributes to rapid burnout and lacks competent leadership.