Hot Mess Soup

If there is one novel that captures the overwhelming ridiculousness of teaching in 2025, it is Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Written in the eight years after WWII, and finally published in 1961, Heller tells the story of Captain John Yossarian, an Air Force bombardier desperately trying to escape combat and stay alive. Heller, himself, was a bombardier in the U.S. Army Air Corps and flew over 60 combat missions in Italy.

While I make no attempt to compare my experiences as a public school teacher with those of combat veterans in any conflict, I do feel like I am navigating a hot mess soup.

As with gradual chaos, it’s been slowly getting worse for some time. I first sensed that teaching was becoming unmanageable in 2005. I had been teaching for a few (messy) years and was still trying to figure out how to teach. I may have been armed with reams of educational theory from my college courses, and even had some classroom experience as a student teacher, but those first years in my own classroom proved difficult. I arrived bright-eyed with notions of “hands-on learning” and creating a “learner-centered” classroom. I was hit with the stress of being responsible for the academic growth of 30+ students as measured by our state’s newly adopted standardized test. What started as week-long practice sessions to prepare students for the exam, soon became months of teaching to the test and taking practice exams. Once the spring semester started, I was coaching students on what to eat for breakfast on the day of testing in order to score well and passing out mints because we were told they helped students better focus. I covered up instructional posters and reassured crying students that their scores would not negatively impact their lives.

When the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Initiative arrived in 2010, I was really struggling to do all the things. Not only did I need to prepare my students for the spring standardized test, I was now flipping my classroom, uploading learning content and resources to our district’s Learning Management System (trying to mimic a MOOC), and, even though we were already a decade into the 21st century, trying to teach my students 21st century information, media, and technology skills. The CCSS promised