I recently heard a story about a couple. The girl is in Teach for America in one of the southern states, and the guy is not a teacher, is not studying to be a teacher, and thus is blissfully ignorant of the trials of the job (an envious position for non-masochists).
The couple's relationship got rocky. The distance didn't help, but the fact that the guy couldn't empathize with the girl's straining profession was worse. She would attempt to explain how demanding her job was, how intense the pressure and stress had become. He would patiently listen, trying to comprehend what she was going through. But as the weeks wore on, he was not an inch closer to understanding how she felt. He became frustrated, and one day even blurted, "How hard can it be? It's just teaching?"
When I went home for the break, I admit that I downplayed to many of my friends and family just how taxing teaching has been for me. (Granted I'd never done anything truly challenging in my life, but trust me when I say, teaching is harder than rocket science.) I didn't describe just how hard teaching had been for me because I knew that if I unabashedly revealed the emotional exhaustion of it, then my non-teacher friends might lose respect for me.
Come on. How hard can teaching be? They'd think.
It's fucking hard. Any given day is exponentially more critical than anything I've ever experienced.
In an article on why teachers quit, Thomas Smith, who is probably a male judging from his name, puts it succinctly. "What people are asked to do is only the kind of thing that somebody can do for two or three years; you couldn’t sustain that level of intensity throughout a career," he said.
So just what is it that I'm asked to do? To start, I have a room full of children, children who have attention spans about half their age in minutes (so for my students, about seven minutes). My job is to present oftentimes boring material in about ten clearly separated but logical chunks.
Do I do this every day? Hell no. Planning seven-minute activities for an entire hour is a lot of work. Planning five of those for a week, and then five more for the second class that I teach is simply too much for me at this stage.
So what happens on those days that are not planned to timed, scaffolded (easy-to-hard), standards-aligned, differentiated (different work for different kids), expeditionary-learning style perfection? Those are most days. And on those days when a lesson isn't flawless, the students are more likely to blurt out disruptively, which leads to more following suit.When this happens, I'm hoping my principal (or anyone for that matter) doesn't walk into my room, because then I look bad–every student action is the responsibility of the teacher, or so I often feel.
Any one class can become unruly, and even though that class will (mercifully) end, there are still four more I have to teach each day, and each one has at least the potential for being wasted by disruptions. While I am improving with giving consequences and keeping classes from imploding, I'm still not good at it.
The point is, the emotional strain of all this is intense. And I'm beginning to see that the profession does not get the recognition it deserves–in more ways than one.
Many have an inaccurate perception of the massive time commitment. In the U.S., teachers "generally spend more time teaching but apparently without an equivalent advantage in pay," compared to other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (whatever that is), according to this article in The New York Times.
Not that I'm very fond of money, but veteran teachers in the U.S. make less than they do in ten other countries, including Germany, Japan, and friggin' Luxemburg.
All of this adds up to a lot of work but not a lot of respect.
Now for another thought on the trials of teaching in this disconnected blog. I remember that when I got into Teach for America, a friend gave me a book by Liping Ma, a really smart lady. If memory serves, the book originally was her doctoral dissertation or something like that. In it, she compares how elementary mathematics is taught in the U.S. and China. Before she wrote it, she knew that students in China were much more successful than those in the U.S., but she wanted to find out why that was.
The couple's relationship got rocky. The distance didn't help, but the fact that the guy couldn't empathize with the girl's straining profession was worse. She would attempt to explain how demanding her job was, how intense the pressure and stress had become. He would patiently listen, trying to comprehend what she was going through. But as the weeks wore on, he was not an inch closer to understanding how she felt. He became frustrated, and one day even blurted, "How hard can it be? It's just teaching?"
When I went home for the break, I admit that I downplayed to many of my friends and family just how taxing teaching has been for me. (Granted I'd never done anything truly challenging in my life, but trust me when I say, teaching is harder than rocket science.) I didn't describe just how hard teaching had been for me because I knew that if I unabashedly revealed the emotional exhaustion of it, then my non-teacher friends might lose respect for me.
Come on. How hard can teaching be? They'd think.
It's fucking hard. Any given day is exponentially more critical than anything I've ever experienced.
In an article on why teachers quit, Thomas Smith, who is probably a male judging from his name, puts it succinctly. "What people are asked to do is only the kind of thing that somebody can do for two or three years; you couldn’t sustain that level of intensity throughout a career," he said.
So just what is it that I'm asked to do? To start, I have a room full of children, children who have attention spans about half their age in minutes (so for my students, about seven minutes). My job is to present oftentimes boring material in about ten clearly separated but logical chunks.
Do I do this every day? Hell no. Planning seven-minute activities for an entire hour is a lot of work. Planning five of those for a week, and then five more for the second class that I teach is simply too much for me at this stage.
So what happens on those days that are not planned to timed, scaffolded (easy-to-hard), standards-aligned, differentiated (different work for different kids), expeditionary-learning style perfection? Those are most days. And on those days when a lesson isn't flawless, the students are more likely to blurt out disruptively, which leads to more following suit.When this happens, I'm hoping my principal (or anyone for that matter) doesn't walk into my room, because then I look bad–every student action is the responsibility of the teacher, or so I often feel.
Any one class can become unruly, and even though that class will (mercifully) end, there are still four more I have to teach each day, and each one has at least the potential for being wasted by disruptions. While I am improving with giving consequences and keeping classes from imploding, I'm still not good at it.
The point is, the emotional strain of all this is intense. And I'm beginning to see that the profession does not get the recognition it deserves–in more ways than one.
Many have an inaccurate perception of the massive time commitment. In the U.S., teachers "generally spend more time teaching but apparently without an equivalent advantage in pay," compared to other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (whatever that is), according to this article in The New York Times.
Not that I'm very fond of money, but veteran teachers in the U.S. make less than they do in ten other countries, including Germany, Japan, and friggin' Luxemburg.
All of this adds up to a lot of work but not a lot of respect.
Now for another thought on the trials of teaching in this disconnected blog. I remember that when I got into Teach for America, a friend gave me a book by Liping Ma, a really smart lady. If memory serves, the book originally was her doctoral dissertation or something like that. In it, she compares how elementary mathematics is taught in the U.S. and China. Before she wrote it, she knew that students in China were much more successful than those in the U.S., but she wanted to find out why that was.
"The examples in [my] book show that when explaining the rationale underlying the arithmetic algorithms they used, the Chinese teachers were significantly more cogent, articulate, and detailed than their U.S. counterparts. Their understanding of the rationale underlying the algorithms indeed gave these teachers a clear and correct direction in which to lead their students’ learning of mathematics."
–Liping Ma, smart woman
I think we need to put more of an emphasis on truly understanding the material that we're teaching students–as Ma says the Chinese do with mathematics–but in order to do that, we need more support, which would require more respect for all the work that we do.
I find myself suffocating in all my daily tasks, and thus relying on the "banking education" that Freire writes about–the type of education wherein teachers make knowledge "deposits" into the minds of their "ignorant students." I don't believe my students are ignorant; quite the contrary, I believe I as a teacher am ignorant to the underlying themes that can connect to my students' lives. I think that oftentimes I don't know the chapter well enough in a given novel to let my students make the leap from answering guided, trivial questions about the story to experimenting with more probing inquiries into the relation between the story and their selves, and having a dialogue about that with classmates and with me.
But right now, with the crushing overflow of responsibilities that I must navigate and somehow complete, I feel my instruction slipping on some days–a sickening feeling, as a result of such is less student learning. But until the profession as a whole can get more support, I don't see how I can shoulder this load while simultaneously becoming a successful teacher. Of course, I'll strive for that anyway, despite its seeming impossibility.
Back to that article on why teachers quit, a cat named Richard Ingersoll says, "To improve the quality of teaching...improve the quality of the teaching job."
I agree wholeheartedly.
I find myself suffocating in all my daily tasks, and thus relying on the "banking education" that Freire writes about–the type of education wherein teachers make knowledge "deposits" into the minds of their "ignorant students." I don't believe my students are ignorant; quite the contrary, I believe I as a teacher am ignorant to the underlying themes that can connect to my students' lives. I think that oftentimes I don't know the chapter well enough in a given novel to let my students make the leap from answering guided, trivial questions about the story to experimenting with more probing inquiries into the relation between the story and their selves, and having a dialogue about that with classmates and with me.
But right now, with the crushing overflow of responsibilities that I must navigate and somehow complete, I feel my instruction slipping on some days–a sickening feeling, as a result of such is less student learning. But until the profession as a whole can get more support, I don't see how I can shoulder this load while simultaneously becoming a successful teacher. Of course, I'll strive for that anyway, despite its seeming impossibility.
Back to that article on why teachers quit, a cat named Richard Ingersoll says, "To improve the quality of teaching...improve the quality of the teaching job."
I agree wholeheartedly.