A HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER TO RESPECT AND ADMIRE

The Teacher. a F/B friend lives and teaches in the  (Mass) Connecticut River Valley

He writes:

Many teachers are ready to call it quits. Some will. Some will hold out in hopes for better days. And others will just collect a pay check. I recently spoke with one teacher who said she can’t see doing this anymore. What is the “this”?

That’s hard to explain. I have had many jobs and teaching is by far the most grueling. It’s a job where you can’t hide. You are in a classroom with anywhere up to 30 children day after day and they are waiting on you.

There is literally nowhere for you to go. Sick, tired, cranky—it doesn’t matter. Those 60 eyes are watching you. It’s a job of immense responsibility. Some of your students are cutting themselves. Some of your students are being abused. Some of your students are using to escape. Some are suicidal. Some commit suicide. (During my career, three students whom I loved killed themselves.)

Teachers are a sort of watchers that attempt to see, to listen, to step in, and, hopefully, to save. And when they fail, those teachers remember. But beyond this they are teaching content: calculus, rhetoric, civics, physics, etc, and they have to not only know the content but how to explain it in a way that others can know and apply it. And they do this every day.

But here is the part that hurts—and what I think this teacher was getting at—no one notices. We work in islands. Occasionally individual teachers receive a deserved award and we applaud them, but most teachers remain unacknowledged.

Even worse, they get just the opposite of acknowledgement; they are devalued, expected to work overtime (for free), and condescended to in small and big ways.

That is the “this” that makes the person I spoke with want to leave the profession. But she won’t leave. I know her. She often talks about her students. She recently helped one write a college essay. She constantly has students stopping by with their problems. For some kids, she’s the only adult they can turn to in the insane teenage years. No one sees the work she does. And that invisibility hurts her. But she’ll be there next year and the year after that because she cares for her students. I respect that colleague more than any one I know