I’ve been watching Abbott Elementary. Something that struck me while watching is how little we get to hear from the teachers who work hard to parent, model, and educate almost every single one of us.

School dramas are usually about teenagers having drama. Kids stories are usually about kids getting up to hijinks. Rarely do we see a first person account of a school from the teacher’s perspective. We almost never see teacher-students relationships narrated at all. In kids shows, teachers are either boring extras or malicious villains.

Teachers do a lot. Teachers give us context. They show us how to do math. They teach us phonetics, how to say things and how to listen. Teachers can do a lot in terms of political education and moral education. They tell us what it means to be a good person and what it means to be a bad person. They keep structure. They create a social context. They discipline.

Likewise, we tend to expect a lot from education. We expect that education will change the world. Some of us believe in it as a great equalizer. We debate amongst ourselves about what education is and about what kinds of knowledge are valued or believed.

Sagittarius is a sign that is guided by Jupiter. Jupiter is the teacher—the educator. Sagittarius is the sign of ideologies and institutions, of things that fall apart when you stop believing in them. Saturn is the planet of generational change and conflict. What’s it doing in the sign of faith?

I do remember the years between 2014 to 2017, those years when Saturn was last in Sagittarius. I attended public school in Iowa all my life and then I went to an arts school in New York in 2010. 2014 was the year when institutions seemed to combust all at the same time. That was on the coattails of Occupy Wall Street, when people camped out in Zuccotti park to confront Wall Street institutions.

I don’t know if people remember this but there were a ton of student protests in 2014 right when Saturn entered Sagittarius. All these college students were going to Occupy and didn’t feel done with Occupy just because Occupy was done. We wanted to challenge institutions and financial ones only made so much sense to us. But school did. We had to go to school everyday. And school wasn’t just school. School was also an endowment, a corporation, and a real estate venture.

There was a crisis in education during Saturn in Sagittarius. We just didn’t believe in it anymore. A lot of us argued over it. Some people said that education isn’t supposed to be about finding a job. Education is about moral guidance, about learning what it means to be a person in society. Some people called that elitist because education used to be reserved for aristocrats and now working people need it because we need jobs. These were heated debates. We were all overly idealistic and overly pragmatic. Both.

Are students just customers? Something worse? Are students just demographics that schools use to pump up their numbers so that they can get endowment money for investment?

Education is an act of faith. Like morality or religion or imagination, it only exists if you believe in it. It falls apart when you stop.

Some people say that education gives you a future. I think that you believe in education if you believe in a future. And vice versa.

What is it like to be Saturn in Sagittarius who takes faith so seriously they challenge almost every idea they can find? Saturn in Sagittarius doubts every single institution out there. They don’t like ideologies. Remember how we were all so obsessed with naming -isms back in 2014? Modernism, colonialism, racism, sexism. Why are we learning about all of these dead white men? All of this shit is just made up. We wanted to challenge the existence, the premise, of every single -ism.

Back then, we created a lot of classes on our own. Kids got up in front of the room we occupied in our tuition protests to teach workshops about accountability, transparency, and nonhierarchical organizing. None of us had that much experience but a lot of ideas. Saturn likes to get down and dirty and make things up organically like that. It’s an unpretentious planet. Sagittarius cares a lot about transparency because it’s a fire sign. Fire gives light and helps us see.

School is really fucked up right now. Schools are not getting funded. Charter schools are taking over more and more of public education. Colleges have these huge endowments that they gamble and students go into a lifetime’s worth of debt just to attend classes. Teachers don’t get paid. A lot of teachers are pretty cool even though our media, sans Abbott Elementary, frequently demonizes their existence.

People care about education. We get mad at it enough. We put so much hope onto it. Education carries the weight of the future. We define our future generations by it.

Saturn in Sagittarius asks us: what if all of this shit that we are learning is just made up? What if the way that we are learning it is also just made up?

I’ve been in a classroom both as a teacher and as a student. After those student protests in 2014, I really wanted to be a teacher. I taught all ages. The character that I relate the most to in Abbott Elementary is probably Janine. I think that teachers tend to go into teaching not because they are satisfied with the current state of the education system but because they want to change something. That must be it. I mean, no one goes into teaching for the money.

This is what I think that most people get wrong about teaching—people tend to think that teaching is about inspiring young minds and filling people with new ideas. Teaching is not like that. Teaching is very real. It’s almost never about the ideas. You have to mediate fighting kids, deal with bureaucratic systems, with online bullying, and you mostly just try to build some kind of stability for kids who barely have any.

Showing up is most of it. If you show up, then you get to try and ask kids who get far too little sleep and have way too much stress on their little shoulders to do something that most adults have no time to do—think. You try and get them to do a little bit of that when you can.

That’s Saturn in Sagittarius. Even when you don’t believe in the future, you have to show up for the kids. Even when you don’t believe in education, you have to teach. That’s the true work of teaching, minus all of the pretensions. Teaching is just about showing up consistently.

Why? Because the future isn’t made of belief. The future is made by showing up consistently day in and day out. Showing up in 90% of the work.

And that’s how you make the future possible. You show up everyday even when you have absolutely no faith in anything. You let your actions speak for you. Your mind may not believe and your body might be tired but you show up, don’t you? Since you show up, then you must believe.

Saturn in Sagittarius asks us to break out hope apart. Hope doesn’t exist. There isn’t such a thing because you can’t actually believe in hope. It’s just the other side of misery. Saturn in Sagittarius is the teacher who doesn’t really believe in education. It’s the faithful devotee of a future that is dead set on collapsing. Faithless? Saturn in Sagittarius will still show up. It will find some way to teach.

I think that a lot of schools say that they education future makers and all that jazz. Cool. Saturn in Sagittarius isn’t about slogans or mystical prophecies. It doesn’t care for inspiration because inspiration is unreliable. People might say that they believe in you but, if you never see them again, then what does that even matter?

Saturn in Sagittarius isn’t the teacher who applauds your faith in the system. It’s the teacher who doubts the system right there with you. It isn’t the teacher who tells you about how great you are and then leaves. It’s the teacher who shows up all of the dang time even when the future is falling apart. It’s the teacher who shows us that the only way to pick up the pieces is to do so one piece at a time using whatever creativity you can muster up in the moment.

Your optimism in the future isn’t the thing that will get you a great education. The most privileged people tend to have the worst education because they are educated in silos that isolate them in illusions instead of connecting them to reality. Your ability to show up and figure it out is your education. Education is just a construct for what we think will get us to the future. It’s made up. Just like the future.