Don't Be A Teacher!

Teaching is lonely. Most teachers go into the field amid a slew of objections from their friends, parents, family, and sometimes even college professors. We are warned that the job is too hard in the current political climate, the pay is too little to sustain us, the students are too disadvantaged to benefit from our long hours and hard work, and that the union is too weak to support us. 

My college academic advisor sat me down for an advising session my senior year and told me about his wife who taught sixth grade English at the middle school close to my university. He told me that her administration was terrible and that she had been doing it for too many years to leave. He said she was miserable and hating going to work every day. He said I was too good of a writer to teach English in public schools. He told me to go into consulting work for education or work for a textbook company. He insisted that was where the real money was and that was where my talents would be best utilized. At the time, I was unsure about education as a career. He closed the deal for me in that conversation and I settled into a sales job after college. I tried to forget about the nagging need in my stomach to stand in front of a classroom of young minds helping them find the love of letters I had. I left the sales job within a few months because of the outlandish ethics violations happening daily in the office. I made the mistake of leaving the job without having another job lined up. After applying every place I could think to send a résumé, I decided to become a wedding planner; in a startling turn of events, that failed.

My father further jaded my deep desires to be a teacher by giving me a dose of reality that same summer. I had been out of work for nearly four months and living at home with my parents. He insisted, “You have to have a job. It’s July, schools are hiring. Go be a teacher until you figure something else out.” He made my dream job feel like I was applying to be the family disappointment. I didn’t have many options at the time, so I gave in and became a teacher. One night, still at my parents’ house, I was grading a ton of student work. He came into my room and said, “Amanda, why are you bothering? The kids you are teaching have already decided where they are going to be in their lives. There is no point in sorting through and grading their work. The kids who are going to fail are going to fail no matter what you do.” At the time, I was teaching seventh grade English at the Title 1 middle school I attended as a kid. A lot of people had come through these kids’ lives and treated them as disposable human beings destined to live in that drug and gang infested neighborhood for their entire lives. I remember that treatment well. But I escaped that neighborhood because I loved school, my teachers encouraged me, and my parents wanted me to be successful. How were the kids I was teaching different from me? And how could any person have decided their fate for the rest of their lives by their pre-teen years? I love my father, but I wrestle with his words often.

Three years into my teaching career, I was selected as teacher of the year at my school. It was an honor I certainly was not ready to receive, but I was excited nonetheless. Time tends to get in the way of long distance friendships and I had not spoken to a friend from high school since before I graduated college. She had no idea I had become a teacher. As I was getting ready for the Teacher of the Year Banquet, the phone rang and it was that very friend calling to catch up. I explained why I did not have time to talk that evening, but that I would call her the next afternoon. She agreed to the time, congratulated me on the honor, and closed the phone call by saying, “I really can’t believe you became a teacher. You are so much smarter than me and all you are doing is teaching? I expected you to be doing a lot more than that in your life.” Her words echoed in my brain throughout the entire banquet.

These were highly respected and deeply loved people in my life: my mentor, my father, and my best friend. None of them supported me in my career decision. I find myself going to work everyday in warrior mode on the good days and survivor mode on the bad days. Parents believe I am working against their children to fail them and rob them of their future. Students believe I am trying to make their lives miserable by taking away all their free time, making them behave, and ruining their GPAs. Administrators believe I am skirting my job responsibilities and doing as little work as possible for my paycheck. Politicians believe I am over paid, over protected, over supplied, and under accountable. Society believes I am incapable of doing any other work besides teaching. My inner social circle of friends and family believe I am a disappointment and failure. Yeah, teaching is lonely…

So why does anyone do it?

The thing is, a lot of us aren’t doing it any more. Teachers are leaving the profession in droves. Aspiring teachers are being advised not to go into the field at all. It is systemically cyclical. Every year the teacher shortage grows and those of us in the field must work harder to compensate which drives more and more of us to the breaking point pushing us out of the profession.

But this professional matters—A LOT—to the forward momentum of our civilization. What can be done to fix it?

1.)  Teachers: If you are currently a teacher or an aspiring teacher, speak more persistently than your naysayers! Thank your mentor for his words of wisdom, redirect the conversation back to you and your career goals. Insist and persist in attaining guidance down YOUR path--not the path of your mentor. Tell your father how grateful you are for all he did to raise you well and let him know all those years of parenting taught you to believe in people when they couldn’t believe in themselves and then walk back into your classroom the next day believing in your students even more than you did the day before. I really want to tell you to hang up on your best friend and enjoy the banquet in your honor, but if we are talking about changing perspectives, you must talk sense into this person, too. Tell her you are doing exactly what you were born to do—helping people everyday to create the best versions of themselves possible, sometimes a version of themselves they couldn’t even see before you came into their lives…THEN enjoy your banquet. Be a strong self-advocate and advocate for your profession.

2.)  Parents: If you are a parent, bless you! Your life is stressful! Let’s cut a deal to make your life easier. I believe (and most teachers believe the same) that you are sending the best student you could raise to school every day, that you love them, you make them do their homework, and you want them to be successful in their lives. In exchange, the teachers of America ask you to believe in us, that we want your child to grow up to be the best adult they can be. We have a lot of your children in our room every day and we aren’t going to make “the right” decision every time, but we are certainly trying to make “the best” decision we can for all parties involved. Please seek understanding with us, so we can be partners in educating your child towards meaningful adulthood.

3.)  Students: If you are a student, education is the one thing no one can ever take away from you. No one can rob you of what you have learned. Every single teacher walks through the doors of their school every day for you—even on the days when it seems like we are “out to get you.” Trust, have faith, have hope, ask questions, be creative, be patient, be respectful, be curious, get a good night’s rest, eat a good breakfast, don’t let a bad bus ride snowball into a bad day at school, focus on yourself during school and no one else, find the joy in your day, and advocate for yourself. Your teachers believe in you.

4.)  Administrators: Administrators are educational leaders at the school site and at the district office. “Staying Gold,” so to speak, is hard to do. There are teachers in the system who are deficient, just like there are students who are deficient. Neither administrators nor teachers can allow themselves to become jaded in their work—if you have become jaded, then it is time to move on to something else. As education professionals, we must remember WHY we got into these careers and WHY we moved up in them. If you aren’t tuned into Simon Sinek’s work, at least watch his TEDTalk. Keep your WHY at the forefront of you work, don’t let the what or the how become your day-to-day. Passionate, energized professionals are necessary to do the work of education—we are magnets who attract other passionate, energized professionals to the career. Find those passionate, energized professionals and inspire them to greatness!

5.)  Politicians: If you are a politician at any level, local school board to President of the United States, you signed up for the difficult task of determining and balancing the public good against private interests. I don’t envy your job, but you volunteered for it…campaigned for it…so you have to do it. Here’s the thing: everyone is a “values voter,” and I am willing to bet you will have a hard time finding a body of constituents who would be willing to say, “Children aren’t important. I don’t care about the future of America.” There are no greater public goods than national security, public safety, the health and welfare of our citizens, and the education of our children. We will have no competitive future workforce without an education system to build a well-rounded populace. Of course, the devil is in the details. We are spending a lot of time arguing about these political issues right now and while that argument takes place, very little innovation is taking place. Please address this. The people who elected you need you. You are the right person for the job. Be a person of action for the public good.

6.)  Americans: Speaking on behalf of American society, we have lost faith in the institution of education. We must seek out the root of this phenomenon. We must learn why and then we must correct it. I wish I had more words of advice on the subject—I don’t. I don’t understand the lip service we pay to education. I know education is hard to do efficiently and effectively. I know it is a big expensive, lumbering beast. I know a lot of Americans have had a bad experience at some point in their educational path. But I know most Americans can also recount that one teacher who changed their life. I know that we value degrees and certifications in the hiring processes across American industries. But when it comes to practicing what we preach, we still just do a lot of talking and very little walking. This phenomenon must change. Our collective future depends upon it. Let's find the best minds in the field and put them to work on this issue.

I started this article by saying teaching is lonely. It is a strange situation to stand in a room full of twenty to forty other people and feel alone. It is a strange situation to know you are one of approximately 3.6 million teachers in America and yet still feel lonely each day in your profession. When you put that into perspective, there are a lot of educational professionals working daily and feeling isolated. The real truth is we do it to ourselves. Here are some things we should remember:

1.)  Reclaim lunch! When we eat lunch in the teacher’s lounge with our colleagues, let’s talk about our own personal lives: weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, travel plans, home remodels, favorite restaurants, and new movie releases. Almost every other profession takes lunch away from the office. We can’t always do that, but we can take a break from the office/classroom mindset. Too many teacher’s lounges are places to go for gossip about interoffice politics, student bashing, and disgruntled grumbling about district policies. Our lunch time conversations have made us unpleasant people. We can reclaim our thirty-minute lunches for positivity.

2.)  Be present! If we change our lunch-time conversations, then we get to be a part of each other’s lives. Let’s be the sort of colleagues who get invited to co-workers’ weddings, baby showers, and holiday parties. We feel lonely because we isolate ourselves from each other and do not share common human bonds aside from a mutual hatred of whatever politician is against education this week or mutual disgust we have for the newest district policy taking away our planning time. We can be present for each other because we understand each other.

3.)  Embrace personhood! Our students are human beings first. They aren’t little robots built to crank out answers to word problems and essays about political movements. Students are people and some of our “worst” students are great people. Let’s appreciate our students’ feelings, desires for success, and perspectives on the world. Laugh at the humor they bring to our day. We can be kind and inspiring to our students when they have a bad day.

4.)  Support each other! The newbies need our help, not our judgment. It does not matter if we think we did it better our first than what we see them doing. Our context is different than theirs. The better we help make them, the better our teaching context becomes. A rising tide floats ALL boats! This goes for teachers in a “gap” year, too. Let’s be honest, if we become present in each other’s lives (see number two above), then we can support each other professionally through those “gap” years of pregnancy, new babies, divorce, illness, or death in the family. Everyone goes through a year when they are just not themselves. We can be friendly professionals who take care of each other.

5.)  Share! We are so plagued with survival mentality that we gather up all the materials, resources, and knowledge we can find. We stick it in our classroom closet thinking there isn’t enough of it to go around, so we must hide it in order to have it when we need it. Pro Tip: shared resources are not divided between us, they are multiplied with us. We can let go of survival mentality and embrace a mindset of abundance and growth instead.

6.)  Home is sacred! We must stop taking home papers to grade. We must stop sending home hours of pointless, drill-and-kill homework to our students. If you are teacher who is also a parent, you don’t want to spend what little evening you have with your own children helping them through school work—you just spent your entire day doing that. Parents, who aren’t teachers, don’t want to go home and spend what little evening they have with their children helping them through school work either. We have hobbies we only touch in the summer. We forget the joy of cooking and eating dinner with our families at dining room tables not covered in student work and lesson plans. We need to go to the park on Saturday for exercise and not go shopping at the office supply store for classroom materials—we need the exercise and we need to save the money. We must reserve Friday nights for the movies we want to see with our spouses, so we can talk about them Monday at lunch. We can be the foundations for our strong, loving homes.

We feel isolated at work because we have hoarded our own selves into our closets. We are lonely and disconnected at home because we have walled ourselves up in corners behind papers to be graded. Let’s come out of our closets and out of our corners and be the vibrant, fun, passionate people we used to be. Remember that person? That person stared down a spiraling, screaming black hole of “DON’T BE A TEACHER!” and smiled. That person said, “being a teacher is the best and most exciting thing I could ever hope or want to be.”

As a very important note, in case you wondered:
Dr. Raymond turned out to be the greatest mentor I ever had.  
My Daddy is my HERO!  
And Pennie and I are still the best of friends!  

My point remains though, don't let anyone, 
no matter who they are or how much you love them, 
talk you out of doing what you know is in your heart!

Amanda McCallister is the Co-Founder and National Advisor of Sigma Alpha Sigma, Inc a non-profit organization dedicated to building educational excellence and opportunities for student leaders.