Analyzing Teacher Memes

I never thought I’d be a teacher meme…  

Rewind to almost twenty years ago, me stepping into the classroom, me ready for the opportunities and challenges of teaching…

Now, compare that to me today and all the teacher memes I live through moment-to-moment: 

• I’m teacher resigned meme when I get invited to my one-hundredth IEP meeting for the semester; 
• I’m teacher inservice meme when I get staff-developed by listening to a Google Slide lecture; 
• I’m teacher look meme when I Ferris Bueller-style break the fourth wall in the classroom, staring incredulously into space when a student asks to turn in an assignment from September when it’s now January;
• I’m teacher meeting memes when I sit in uncomfortable cafeteria seats, craning my neck and wrenching my back to listen to an administrator tell me it’s not about test scores–but our test scores should be better;
• I’m teacher training memes when I’m given another book for another book study that won’t make it past the first department meeting of the year;
• I’m teacher observation memes when an administrator who hasn’t been in the classroom for fifteen years gives me feedback on students and their cell phones when the school won’t commit to a standard cell phone policy for classrooms.

We have to wonder, then, what these teacher classroom memes say about us, about our students, about our communities, and about education in the world today. 

With that, then, let’s analyze a couple of teacher memes of 2023 and see what they mean in the context of education today.

Coffee Anyone? 

Let’s begin with a classic teacher voice meme motif: a cup of coffee.  You’ve seen the one(s) I’m talking about.  

There are the memes with giant coffee cups–with sizes befitting a giant–with the text noting it’s “the right amount of coffee” for a teacher.  

Or there are the ones with normal-sized coffee mugs–but there is an aggrandized saying emblazoned on it.  (Think something like “Teacher fuel,” for example.)  

And, of course, there are the teacher humor memes with a frazzled, stressed, disheveled, shouting, or vacant-eyed person (who’s sometimes a celebrity like Chef Gordon Ramsey or Chandler from Friends) that notes what teachers are like without coffee constantly being pumped intravenously into their veins and souls, with them screaming “Where’s my coffee????”.

Looking at the memes, one would think that teachers are strung-out caffeine addicts, just an empty coffee mug away from losing their grip on the space-time continuum.  

As a sometimes coffee drinker, I can say that I don’t run on Dunkin’–but it does help me in a pinch as I shuffle from place to place, classroom to classroom from 7:00 in the morning until 3:00 in the afternoon, the length of my school’s day.

Staring into the void of those long hours does seem daunting–but it’s doable. 

Indeed, as teachers, we find that almost everything is doable.  (Take a look at teacher mom memes out there to see what a really busy life looks like, but even when living the double-life of parent and educator, we make it doable.)

That seems to be a prevailing mindset many educators have: it’s doable.  Lesson plan for five classes, grade 75 essays, contact parents, collect and analyze data, and and and . . . It’s all doable, and I know this because we educators get it done.  No matter what’s put in front of us, we make it work.  We problem solve.  We decide.  We do.

The world’s mistaken, though, to think with their teacher humor memes that what we need to do this is coffee, a bit of a caffeinated push.  (We see this play out in our schools all the time: We have a teacher in-service day where we are asked to shift our practice, change our curriculum, follow a new policy all in the same day–but hey, we’ve got coffee and donuts for you in the staff lounge.  And don’t forget to take five minutes of self-care time in between the micro-planned minutes on the agenda as you move to the next session.) 

Indeed, to do it, we need more than coffee.  We need more trust and time.  More agency and less wellbeing pageantry.

This is Fine(?)

Another teacher meme that makes the internet-rounds is the famous image of the dog sitting at a table in a burning house, its eyes wide and unseeing, a coffee mug–there’s the coffee again!–on the table, and the bolded white phrase hanging over it all: “This is fine.”

COVID hits and we instruct students online and in-person (alternatively and/or simultaneously)?  This is fine.  I’m teaching in five classrooms for five different classes, traveling with everything I own on my back, saddled with way too much paperwork and data collection just to make district happy, forsaking any chance at relieving my bladder between periods?  This is fine.  The air conditioning isn’t working, the planet’s melting, and classrooms are 85 degrees?  This is fine.

This mantra guides so much of what we do because . . . well, what choice do we have?

Regardless of what’s happening at home, at school, or in-between, our students will be waiting for us, and as professionals, we rise again and again and again to meet our professional responsibilities, despite all that’s not fine.

It’s not fine that our students come to school hungry, that our resources and resolve get stretched thinner and thinner each year, that teachers burnout and bail out of the profession, that people attack educators, and that some people think educators are okay with the house burning down around them because “they get summers off.”

No, if things are fine, it’s because we have made them great in our classrooms, but all the factors outside of our control have nibbled away at that greatness, grinding it down to fine. 

Teacher Memes as Shared Experiences

Perhaps, though, I’m reading too much and too far into these teacher memes and their purposes as they are, after all, meant to be hilarious–and some are for sure.  (Just check out some of the teacher Christmas vacation memes for some teacher memes Christmas chuckles.)  

Perhaps these teacher humor memes serve a fine purpose themselves: giving us a shared language with other educators to understand, to process, to survive, and even to enjoy this great profession of ours–teaching.  Each teacher meme we see and appreciate (even each teacher meme we become) could bring us closer to all the other educators serving students.  

We see in these memes me and you, all of us who do what we do because we have a deep and abiding love for our students and our craft, regardless of what is happening in the wider-world around us.  (Well, that and the one-day-in-the-future promise of appreciating all those teacher retirement memes we see all over!)