What Teaching Taught Me

5 min read - BY STEVE NUZUM

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.

Teacher Exhaustion and Burnout

Apr 30 - 7 min read - BY STEVE NUZUM

I left my career as a full-time teacher two years ago, after sixteen years in the classroom. 

Recently, I was invited by a former colleague to return for a day to score capstone presentations for a senior research class. We sat at a plastic folding table, watched students give 10-15 minute academic presentations on a variety of subjects, and asked the students pre-selected questions from a list. We took notes, gave feedback, and scored using printed rubrics. We did this from 9AM to 4 PM, with a 20-minute break for lunch.

On paper, this is a pretty standard work day and likely doesn’t sound very taxing to anyone who hasn’t been a teacher.

But when I got home that afternoon, I almost immediately collapsed into my bed and slept like a rock for two hours. This took me back to the days 16-17 years earlier when I was in my first years in the classroom. I would get home, launch myself into a couch or bed, and lose consciousness until it was dark outside. 

What is so exhausting about the profession?

Wang et al, in the literature review portion of a recent psychology paper, write:

“Teacher emotional exhaustion stands as a fundamental dimension of occupational burnout within the educational landscape, characterized by a profound depletion of emotional resources due to chronic stressors associated with the teaching profession (Chang, 2009; Maslach and Leiter, 2016; Klusmann et al., 2023). This state encompasses feelings of being emotionally drained, overextended, and lacking the energy necessary to meet the profession’s emotional demands..."

According to the same study, prior research shows that, “The persistent strain stemming from diverse student needs, administrative pressures, and workload demands significantly contributes to this emotional drain (Kyriacou, 2001; Hui et al., 2022). Moreover, emotional exhaustion often corresponds to a perceived decline in effectiveness and accomplishment in the professional role. Teachers “experiencing emotional exhaustion may feel a reduced sense of achievement and efficacy in positively impacting students’ lives or contributing meaningfully to their education (Maslach et al., 2001; Rumschlag, 2017).

Or, as I explained to my principal at the end of what turned out to be my penultimate year as a teacher, the profession had left me “emotionally, physically, and spiritually tired”.

“Decision fatigue”

Teaching has always been a challenging job, and teachers have probably always faced obstacles in balancing effective work in the classroom with overall mental and physical health, but in recent years the profession has seen a significant increase in burnout and retention issues. And teachers often report feelings of stress and overwork as major drivers in decisions to leave their current jobs, or to leave the profession altogether.

One commonly-cited source of stress is that teachers are constantly making decisions, and excessive decision-making can certainly lead to fatigue. An article from the American Medical Association defines decision fatigue as “a state of mental overload that can impede a person’s ability to continue making decisions.”

Throughout the day, teachers have to constantly “monitor and adjust,” responding to a wide range of verbal and nonverbal feedback from students to fine-tune the way they address each class and each student. 

During planning periods (or, as I’ve heard many students, parents, and others outside of the profession call them, “free periods”) teachers are generally monitoring hallways, attending mandatory professional development or accommodation meetings, grading papers, making calls, and responding to student emails and messages. They are perhaps taking their first restroom breaks of the day, or their first sips of water. 

During lunch, transitions, and before and after school, they are often called to duty stations. These include duties that require them to be perhaps the only adult supervising hundreds of students in a cafeteria, or in a busy hallway. I vividly remember my lunch duty weeks, when I wouldn’t even have a radio to call for help if some kind of emergency occurred.

And that’s just the most common core functions of the job and the “other duties as assigned”. Teachers also have to deal with student conflicts, with mental health crises, with violence, with shooting threats, with fire alarms and lockdowns.

Things got worse during the pandemic.

Many of these exhausting trends have been slowly building over decades, but the COVID-19 pandemic intensified them.

A recent report from the RAND Foundation found that, “More teachers and principals

than other working adults reported symptoms of depression and not coping well with their job related stress. More teachers than other working adults reported burnout, and about half as many teachers reported feeling resilient to stressful events compared with other working adults.” 

The same study found that “In January 2022, about one-third of teachers and

principals reported that they were likely to leave their current teaching or principal job by the end of the 2021–2022 school year,” and that educators’ intention to leave the profession was significantly correlated with feelings of stress and burnout. 

This fits with what we learned when I conducted a survey of about 2,200 South Carolina educators and school staff for SC for Ed in November 2020: “Only 56% of current teachers and staff surveyed plan to continue in their current positions beyond this school year. 39% of current teachers and staff plan not to return to their current positions, a significant increase from the 27% who had the same plans during our previous survey.”

These self-reported intentions and feelings translated to real losses in school staff. SC’s 

Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement (CERRA) has reported increasingly record-breaking numbers of vacancies and departures from the profession over most of the past five years. 

The RAND study found that, after pay, the number one factor that would influence educators to stay in the profession was “Spending less time on non teaching duties (e.g., meetings, paperwork, bus duty)”. Similarly, the SC-specific data showed that, in particular, the third most common suggestion selected by educators for how to retain them was, “Treat staff as professionals by allowing them to make decisions about their areas of expertise.” (Again, better compensation was the number one choice.) 

And many teachers specifically referenced exhaustion, stress, and fatigue as major problems at their jobs. Here are some representative examples from teachers who participated in the SC for Ed survey and responded to the optional free-response questions:  
 

• “I’m tired of feeling beat up by our district that has optimistic mission statements but doesn’t protect their teachers and staff first” (Charleston). 
• “We are stressed. Tired… not valued and being a fairly new teacher, it has me questioning whether I want to teach anymore. Or whether it’s just like this in South Carolina” (Dorchester 4). 
• “Teachers are being overworked and are exhausted, yet more demands keep being placed upon us” (Lexington/ Richland 5). 
• “Exhausted with the increasing usurpation of both my planning and personal time” (Richland 2). 
• “I would love to stay in SC but am exhausted by the endless amount of ‘extra duties’ assigned with no notice and no extra pay to compensate for extra work.. My current plan is to sell my house and move back to a state with strong unions, tenure and clearly defined contracts” (Horry). 
• “They need to figure out how to take something off my plate. I have more to do and less time to do it in. I'm exhausted!” (Laurens 55). 

(It should also be emphasized that multiple studies have reported that teachers of color are even more likely than white peers to suffer from stress and fatigue. And it is probably no coincidence that in South Carolina and throughout the country, the teaching population includes statistically fewer people of color than the student population, by a significant degree.) 

So what, if anything, is to be done? 

As many teachers in the SC survey suggested, teaching, while challenging, does not inherently have to be exhausting or stressful to the point where it damages mental health and makes teachers want to quit. Some cited a need for union or professional organization protections that South Carolina’s anti-labor laws and a culture encouraging teacher martyrdom have made difficult to sustain.

A need to reform teacher contracts came up repeatedly in the South Carolina data, as did a focus on non-teaching duties. And nationally, RAND found that “The amount of time teachers spend instructing students has declined during the pandemic, while time spent on non teaching duties (e.g., planning, paperwork) has increased.” 

So clearly, even small steps toward reducing paperwork, such as the proposed SC Educator Assistance Act, which aims at partly addressing some of the major concerns with teacher contracts, are vital. And even if the state passes the Act, there will be a great deal of work to do in making the profession less unnecessarily stressful. 

And it’s unlikely that we can address burdensome paperwork without also addressing state- and district-mandated testing. The testing and accountability obsessions that took hold of America post-A Nation at Risk have been self-perpetuating. During the No Child Left Behind era, they represented a misguided bipartisan consensus that many of society’s problems-- some real, like childhood poverty and unemployment, and some largely imaginary, like a supposed rise in illiteracy-- should be solved by schools, alone, and that it was “failing schools” that were the primary drivers. In the ensuing years, they have been a ready weapon for those pushing school vouchers.

For example, freshman SC House member Jeff Bradley notably berated an educator who was testifying during the sole public comment period around S. 62, the voucher bill being fast-tracked through the SC legislature. Bradley repeatedly, and without citing evidence, based his angry rhetorical questions-- which were the subject of an entire op-ed from The State about the loss of civility in the legislature-- on the premise that South Carolina is full of “failing schools” and that we spend “billions of dollars” without seeing any return on that investment.

Representative Jeff Bradley (Beaufort) 

This hyperfocus on “fixing” schools-- and on defining “effectiveness” in schools in more and more self-servingly impossible ways-- has led to a greater and greater burden of testing, pre-testing, post-testing, and paperwork, exhausting teachers, administrators, and students, and leaving less and less time and energy for the complex work of actually teaching.

While teachers were often told during the height of the pandemic that they needed to engage in “self-care” (and while practices like mindfulness, exercise, and leaving schoolwork at school are probably great ideas for dealing with individual stress), we can’t self-care our way out of systemic issues, many of which have been either intentionally generated or embraced by people who want to defund schools and fund school vouchers. 

To address teacher exhaustion and burnout, we need to reject the narrative that schools are fundamentally the problem, or that more testing and more paperwork will make schools better. We need to focus on how important schools are in most communities, the many purposes they serve, and repair what isn’t working for all of our students. But we also need to stop piling real and imaginary social ills on the backs of some of the only public servants actively working to address them. 

Educational Trauma

Jul 8, 2024 - 6 min read - BY STEVE NUZUM

Content warning: because of the subject, this article necessarily contains descriptions of physical and emotional harm to students and staff members, both during and after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Being traumatized means continuing to organize your life as if the trauma were still going on— unchanged and immutable— as every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past.

— Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., The Body Keeps the Score (2015)

Schools are, by definition, places of growth. Learning is growth; developing new skills and new ideas is growth. One of the more confusing anti-public school arguments of the past several years has been that learning new things-- about history, about different perspectives, or about living in a pluralistic society-- should not create any “discomfort”. 

But there are important differences between topics and experiences which cause healthy discomfort-- the kind that pushes students to stretch further into what educational psychologist Lev Vygotssky called the “zone of proximal development”-- and those which trigger or even create traumatic experiences.

Research suggests that the traumatized brain can be incapable of separating a past experience-- such as the fear of imminent death or bodily harm-- from a present trigger. And it may not be possible for people who have experienced traumatic experiences to use logic or other common coping strategies to get themselves away from the feeling that something unsafe or frightening that happened in the past is now happening again in the present.  

While schools are often the ideal place to explore new, exciting, and even uncomfortable topics, they can also be places of trauma, places where emotional, mental, or social growth becomes frozen in a negative experience. 

There are the obvious examples of severe trauma in schools: school shootings or other violence, the sudden loss of members of the school community, and natural disasters, can immediately change the face of a school community.  And while some students and staff members may simply move on from these experiences in a way that incorporates them into their understandings of the world in healthy ways, others may not be able to move beyond those experiences without help. 

There are also subtler traumas, and also subtler moments that exacerbate already existing traumas.  For many students and adults, school is a place of intense stress and anxiety. For example, performance on tests and assignments can weigh heavily on students and families. A bad grade may be in a sense just a number on a page, but it might trigger an argument or a fight at home. A comment from a teacher or peer intended to be benign may trigger deep feelings of hurt or shame in a student who has brought traumatic experiences into the classroom.

And over the past several years, the majority of students and school staff members have shared experiences which may meet psychologist and researcher Bessel van der Kolk’s definition of traumatization, by changing individuals’ psychic landscapes until their world has been influenced by trauma. In small or large ways, school may be no longer associated with growth or with positive change. 

I stopped teaching this school year, and when I think about school I have a lot of positive memories, but I also have images in my mind which seem to meet this definition of trauma. 

For example, I vividly remember walking to my classroom in a building that normally rang with the intense noise of almost two thousand students; now, I could hear the soles of my sneakers on the tile floor.  

Ahead of me, just past my classroom, was a temporary wall covered with thick, semi-transparent plastic; with so few students in the building, the district had decided to complete major renovations during the school day, and the sound of jackhammers shattering concrete walls sometimes filled the mostly-deserted building. I knew when I got to class I would be sitting in a room, designed for about twenty students (and normally filled with around thirty), either alone or with one or two students. We would be sitting far apart, wearing masks, and largely communicating through the computer screen so that the majority of students, who were home, could be included in our conversations and lessons.

Sometimes the feeling that we were living in a dystopian or even apocalyptic reality was oppressive and frightening. But it was something that, as a community, we would never really talk about together.

During the height of the pandemic, our school community lost people. Our district witnessed the death of several employees to the COVID-19 virus, including a twenty-eight-year-old teacher. Two of my students, siblings, lost both of their parents. Our school zip code often reported the most new cases in the state, and the death and hospitalization counts were often terrifyingly high, though the state and country would seem to largely forget this in the months when cases were low. We went back to school in person before a vaccine had been available in our state-- Governor Henry McMaster famously released a statement on vaccine eligibility in the state, saying that, “If we allow teachers to jump the line, we are taking vaccines from our most vulnerable population who are dying from this virus.”

During my last year as a teacher, two students were involved in a confrontation that resulted in one student stabbing the other. Although the student who was stabbed recovered from those injuries, staff members vividly remembered the experience of seeing the student bleeding in the hallway, and of getting the student’s blood on their own hands and clothing as they tried to help. The incident was also witnessed by other students, and presumably the experience was especially traumatic for the student who lay in the hallway bleeding from the wounds.

For many people who spend every weekday in the school building, it’s hard to move on from these kinds of experiences, hard to see the school building as a place of safety.  Knowing intellectually that schools are now relatively safe may not be enough to help adults or students who are having a hard time stepping foot in those buildings.

American political rhetoric around schools has long prioritized metrics like graduation rate, seat time, daily attendance, and staff retention rates, but if we don’t see the potential for trauma or other factors-- both the large and systemic ones and the personal and intimate ones-- to complicate the meaning of those numbers, we are unlikely to be able to use them or to change them, where necessary. 

I’m not sure any school is really equipped to respond to these kinds of trauma, whether slow-moving or sudden and violent. And because of the politically-motivated cultural battles that have been playing out over the past several years-- what writers Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider call “The Education Wars” in their upcoming book of the same name-- schools may be even more afraid than before to address “social emotional learning” or to incorporate trauma-informed practices into the everyday culture of a school.  

Complicating matters, introducing real, research-based psychological practices into school buildings is often challenging and expensive. Well-intentioned districts (or districts simply trying to respond to increased pressure to be all things to all students) might incorporate sketchy or superficial programs that don’t actually address mental health issues. It may be impossible with current budgets to hire mental health staff like licensed and trained counselors. 

All of this points to a need for educators and public school advocates-- perhaps especially parents and students-- to steer the educational conversation away from the “education wars” and back towards nuts-and-bolts solutions to real problems. Making schools actually safer-- both by incorporating research-based mental health interventions and by physically upgrading outdated facilities-- can be part of an overall solution. But part of why there are so many walking wounded people in school buildings is that American society has fallen for the lie that schools, alone, can fix almost every social problem, from pandemics to violence to social media and substance addictions to poverty.  

Schools simply cannot do this, and those of us who care about kids and about the people who teach and care for them need to push for social supports that go beyond warehousing kids and pretending that they all enter with the same experiences, with the same advantages and disadvantages, and without underlying mental health challenges that might need to be addressed before meaningful growth and learning can happen.