It’s a cliche in the education system to say “I learn as much from my students as they do from me”. But it’s a cliche for a reason.
I left the classroom a few years ago, but I often wonder what kind of person I would be today if I hadn’t spent almost two decades in schools after I stopped formally being a student myself.
Of course it’s impossible to see the road not taken, but I imagine I would have been a very different person.
Let’s get the less positive stuff out of the way first.
The educational system was traumatic for me, as it is for many faculty, staff, and students. Some years, there was a level of high stress that was simply not sustainable, driven partly by student behavior, but mostly by the constantly shifting and growing demands generated by a system that often tries to fend off bad-faith attacks (from the voucher industry, from politicians running on a “fix the schools platform,” from “parental rights” groups) by treating them like they’re good-faith criticisms. (You perceive kids “can’t read”? Let’s triple the amount of reading pre-assessments we give. You are arguing that any book that makes you personally uncomfortable is harmful to students? Let’s just remove all of those books “pending review”.)
Common knowledge and research tell us that modern teaching can be harmful to practitioners. For example, one literature review conducted during the height of the COVID era review found that, “The stress associated with the teaching profession can be linked to three major overlapping issues: burnout, anxiety, and depression, which have a myriad of effects, including an impact on teachers’ health, well-being, and productivity.” For me, teaching was probably not the only factor that led to my burnout, but it was a major factor.
Most of that burnout was related to the systems and politics surrounding the profession. There were of course days when students created challenges, but the things that kept me up at night were most often related to structural and systemic issues created by leaders at the state and district levels. I left the classroom more convinced than ever that bureaucratic systems, while necessary, have to be constantly checked by the public in a good faith effort to make them work on behalf of communities, students, and workers.
Unfortunately, many of the loudest voices at school board meetings-- particularly in the post-pandemic era-- have no interest in strengthening the system, because they want it to fail, in favor of funding “alternative” education programs (usually school vouchers). Or they have no idea how to address what they perceive as problems, because education is incredibly complex.
But teaching also made me a better person.
I left teaching a more patient person than I ever was before. By my math, I worked with around 2,000 individual students over the course of my career. Each one had a specific set of life experiences which led through my classroom on their way to wherever they went next. And over time I learned to interpret many of the “conflicts” that would have irritated me as a younger person as simply differences. (Therapy helped a lot to make this connection; I personally believe every teacher should be provided with optional access to a high-quality therapist, paid for by their employer. Sadly, this is a rarity, and I believe it’s a systemic contributor to burnout, to negative teacher-student relationships, and to mental health issues that increasingly threaten the profession.)
I left teaching with problem-solving skills that in my post-education work environments have made most issues that come up seem, frankly, easy to address.
Teachers, depending on the day, are life coaches, career coaches, event planners, presenters, writers, researchers, childcare providers, and many other things. But more than any specific skill, the constant focus on metacognition– on helping students learn how they learn– has made me reflect deeply on how I learn. Teaching molded me into a person who can face most new problems by asking questions and finding the answers, rather than getting overwhelmed. (I’ve been especially grateful for this skill as I tackle complex home repairs that, as a former teacher, I can’t afford to pay someone else to complete.)
Teaching also caused my political awakening.
Policy was vague and abstract for me before I’d spent a few years teaching in some very different districts, seeing firsthand what policy choices did to actual people. In one district– the one I attended as a K-12 student– I saw what it really meant that funding and attention from the district correlated with which geographical part of the district we were in. The schools I attended as a student– racially diverse, located near the city center, and generally well-funded– looked and felt incredibly different from a school in the same district where I taught just a few years after my high school graduation.
In this school, where 99% of the population was Black and from a more rural part of the district, the school culture was different-- much more focused on “discipline” (punishment) and on supposed deficits in the students-- and the facilities were of lower quality. Students in this middle school were not allowed to attend recess. They were required to wear uniforms. Rules and norms were unclear and poorly enforced.
And, looking back on it, I was at least a small part of the problem. Unsupported by administration and unfamiliar with the school culture, I learned a lot about what not to do as a teacher the hard way.
Knowing what I know now, I believe we were setting many students up for discipline issues and the school-to-prison pipeline. And the district didn’t seem to be watching us as carefully as schools closer, geographically, to the district office, meaning there was little in the way of effective corrective guidance from district administrators.
All of this, ultimately, made me care about and understand school funding in a way I never had before.
It also made me, naively, start to push to organize the employees of the school, to allow us to collectively bargain. Of course, as I would discover the hard way, that South Carolina’s anti-labor laws and the culture of frightened obedience it has inculcated in its education work force, would make that kind of organization and direct action unattainable (at least for me) for at least another decade.
Teaching is very important. At their best, schools can be safe places for students and vital resources for communities.
But teachers are not superheroes or supervillains, and I believe approaching teaching as a kind of holy martyrdom where we suffer for the supposed benefit of students-- something explicitly encouraged by many leaders-- makes the profession less sustainable. I do think teachers are often special people, because they have had special experiences. They have been generally drawn to a helping profession, and if they have the right set of circumstances and a healthy approach to lifelong learning, the classroom can be a place of continual growth.
They also need support, including mental health support, in order to keep doing what they do. If we care about kids, we need to push for environments that allow good teachers to keep teaching for as long as they want.
