Work Worth Doing

Teddy Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States, was known for doing hard work to overcome great obstacles.  He was born rather sickly, battling asthma by adopting a "strenuous lifestyle."  He attended Harvard, wrote books, served as the Secretary of the Navy, fought in the War in Cuba, became governor of New York, and became President in the Wake of the assassination of President McKinley.  He busted monopolies, established the National Parks system, built the Panama Canal, and won the Nobel Peace Prize.  This was an accomplished man who knew the value of hard work.

In a campaign speech to the farmers of upstate New York, another group of people who knew the value of hard work, Roosevelt said, "Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing."  He believed that work was the thing that gave life meaning.  It was how you rebounded from the difficulties of life; it was good for the spirit.  When his wife died, he threw himself into his work.  In that same speech to the farmers of New York, he said, "There is no room in our healthy American life for the mere idler."

When I was a kid, I was a little afraid of growing up.  It seemed like every adult I knew hated their job.  At least, they talked about it like they did.  When I was a teenager, I did a little survey as my fellow choir members arrived at church.  I asked each of them about their job.  I got a wide range of sighs and groans until Ron Butler came in.  When I asked him about his job, he grinned and talked about living with "spizerinctum," a word he made up for how energized he felt by his work.  It was greatly encouraging to hear an adult talk with such joy about the work he was doing, and it was clear that he loved it because he believed it mattered.  

I don't know if the work I do would be deemed working hard by President Roosevelt.  After all, I am not working a plow or building a building.  I do like to think, however, that he would consider it work worth doing.  Teaching is not simply the delivery of information from 8 to 3 as many believe.  It is teaching students to think, to evaluate, to analyze, and to create new work.  It is showing them good citizenship, good relationships with other teachers, and good submission to authority (even with rules you don't like).  It is putting your own character up as a model every minute of every day.  A former principal used to say that we should be so sure of the steps we take that we have no problem with the idea that our students will put their feet in the same steps.  Imagine that is your job every day, and you know why teachers need summer.

Adam and Eve were put into the Garden of Eden to work.  That was before the fall.  After the fall, work became difficult; but they didn't sit around doing nothing before the fall.  Work is an important part of human nature when it is productive.  When it is not productive, it is punitive.  Tedious work (like digging a hole one day just to fill it the next) has been used as a form of torture for centuries.  The psychology of the human mind is such that we must believe work is worth doing in order to work hard at it.  That's why you hear kids complain about "busy work" and why you get a lot more out of them if you tell them why they are doing it.  I am sitting here writing this on a teacher work day.  I have graded, worked on curriculum, uploaded photos to Jostens, dealt with e-mails, and written this blog.  I am not drained and exhausted because I feel this is valuable work - work worth doing.  When my students come in next Monday, I will be ready to do more work.  Am I tired at the end of the day?  You bet.  But it is a very different kind of tired than that experienced by those who view their job as drudgery.  

Social psychologist Matt Wallaert set out to explore why so many are unemployed when jobs are available.  He found that many are not finding jobs that live up to their own expectations of what they thought they would make after college.  Not realizing the value of paying their dues and comparing themselves only to their expectations, they simply opt out of the job market because it makes them feel as if they haven't really lost anything - read this article to make sense of that line.  They are also being diagnosed with depression at massive rates because they are not getting the feeling of meaning that comes from doing work worth doing.  

It has been over 100 years since President Roosevelt commended those farmers for their work, and I fear that the world they built has made us soft, made us fear difficult work, and made us believe that life owes us comfort for no other reason than that fact that we were born.  The students I teach are wonderful, but it is difficult to battle this cultural idea that we might be rich and famous without doing anything.  Commercials tell us what we deserve (money for a car accident, phone plans, tires, and contact lenses).   What have we done to earn those things?  Being alive.  If I believe pop culture, the simple act of being born has apparently endowed me with the right to stuff, to happiness, and to not ever feeling shamed or offended.  This isn't the way God made us.God made us to work.  Work, like all things, was distorted by the fall.  Work became more difficult with less result.  Work became tedious.  Work did not stop being important.  It has continued to be part of the human experience.  To quote Leslie Knope at the end of the series finale of Parks and Recreation, "Go find your team, and get to work."