Wheat-dogg's World

JISHOU, HUNAN — Yesterday, I read a Washington Post column by Sarah Fine, a young, idealistic teacher who was quitting the profession after four years. It’s a well written, poignant piece, and I wanted to write some reaction to it here.

I had trouble working up a sufficient head of steam to get started. I had lots of things to say, but nothing was gelling in my mind. So, figuring reading something else would help, I swung over to the Daily Kos to see what was up there.

Amid all the political commentary was this excellent response to Fine’s column by teacherken (Ken Bernstein), which at this writing has received more than 350 comments, some sympathetic, some critical.

If you read teacherken’s response to Sarah Fine’s confessional, you will pretty much read be reading my reactions, too. He and I share several characteristics: we both got liberal arts educations at renowned northeastern institutions (he, Haverford; me, Princeton), we both worked in other professions before becoming teachers later in life (he much later than I), we’re both Quakers, both liberal Democrats, both socially liberal, both love teaching.

But I have a few other things to say, now that it’s a day later and I’ve had more time to mull over Fine’s column.

Some of my readers already know my background, but for the benefit of the one or two people who are not members of my family, friends, colleagues or present and former students, here’s a quick recap.

After graduation from university, I worked for five years for two small daily newspapers in Wyoming and Kentucky. Halfway through year 5, I was disenchanted with daily newspaper journalism and wanted to do something different, and perhaps more meaningful. So, I ended up in grad school to get a masters of arts in teaching physics, a program which incidentally I never finished. Midway through my master’s program I serendipitously landed a job at a small independent high school teaching physics.

I stayed at that school for 23 years, one of which I spent on a Fulbright teacher’s exchange in South Africa, and seven of which I also served as the school’s technology coordinator. I finally left the school in June 2008, 24 years after I first walked through its doors as part of my teacher-prep observation requirement.

Sarah Fine’s school and mine are worlds apart. Had her first gig been at my school, she would probably still be teaching. Hers instead was a charter school in Washington, D.C., where she was overworked and underappreciated, an expendable cog in a factory to churn out graduates. Mine was a rare oasis of collegiality and mutual respect among administrators, staff, teachers and students, where I was pretty much free to teach however I liked, so long as my students actually learned something.

Fine fails to address one distinctive aspect of teaching, so you may not fully understand the anguish this young woman endured during her short stint. Classroom teaching is a lonely profession. Sure, the teacher is certainly never alone while teaching a roomful of students, but in that role he or she is the sole leader of the class. Few of us have teaching assistants or aides. For seven hours a day, the teacher runs the show in his or her classroom, herding 25 to 35 cats who for the most part would rather be curled up in bed at home or frolicking outside. With few exceptions, no one pokes their head in to see what the teacher is doing. The classroom is a little island nation, isolated from the rest of the school.

[Another aspect of the loneliness of the profession are the untold hours spent reading and grading homework assignments outside class. Classroom teachers cannot pass this chore off to some teaching assistant like college professors do.]

Now, if a teacher has an understanding administration that supports and trusts its teachers, the isolation is not a bad thing. In fact, for the right kind of person, it’s a liberating experience. Being master of one’s domain gives a teacher extraordinary leeway in organizing class activities, trying out new teaching methods, and pushing the envelope of teaching. Most truly excellent teachers are also still learners; they realize that each year presents new opportunities to try new things, to learn new methods of reaching their students.

Of course, this petty fiefdom situation can also lead to abuse of the system and/or the students, if a teacher has the wrong kind of temperament, has an axe to grind, or has a certain inability to keep sex out of the teacher-student relationship. Fortunately, most of the nation’s teachers are mindful of their ethical and professional responsibilities, or we’d have a hell of a mess on our hands.

Fine, by her description, wanted to be a push-the-envelope kind of teacher. Her students were active learners, and scored well on mandated examinations, but she had zero appreciation and support from her superiors. Her wide-eyed efforts to improve education at her school were summarily ignored by the administration, discounting both her role as a professional and as a valued employee.

Many teachers, myself included, say they stay in the profession because of the kids. It sounds a little sappy when we say it, but it’s true. A subject teacher invariably teaches the same old thing year-in, year-out, but we teach it to a different group of students each time. Each class of students has a certain “class personality.” There may be individual students who for one reason or another stand out in the crowd, but the group as a whole within a few weeks jells into a unit with its own quirks and goals. Dealing with each new class is, for lack of a better word, fun. Teaching is a people-oriented profession; if you don’t like dealing with people, you should find another job.

Students, at least in my admittedly blessed experience, want to learn and may even enjoy being in your class (though they may outwardly deny it). If the teacher can channel their energy into learning the subject at hand, the outcome is mutually satisfying for all involved. Students also bring their own ideas and skills to the classroom. A teacher (who is not a petty dictator) can learn as much from these students as they from the teacher. My former headmaster often said teaching kept him young, and I concur. I think working with people my own age now would be indescribably dull.

But staying for the students only works for so long. At some point in any teacher’s career, there is the burnout point. In Fine’s case, she burned out at year four, a victim of poor administrative support and a sense that no one respected teaching as a profession. My burnout came much later in my career.

I have not talked about this part of my career with hardly anyone, so if you’ve read this far, you may be in for some surprises.

Around my fourth or fifth year, one of my students asked my why I didn’t do something else, like become a physicist or an engineer. I told him that for me teaching was fun, and when it stopped being fun, I would pack it in and do something else.

I avoided burnout by taking summer workshops, learning new techniques, employing computers in the laboratory, tweaking my syllabus each year, and taking a year to teach abroad. On the other hand, I wrote my own burnout warrant when I agreed to become the school’s tech coordinator on returning to the US in 2001.

Originally, the job did not require much work. The school had one server, few email accounts, a small computer lab filled with underpowered computers, and little dependence on technology. As the years passed, though, fueled by my own vision for the school’s technology and the growing pervasiveness of IT in society, the tech coordinator job became exponentially more time consuming. By 2008 my work week was typically 50-60 hours long, which did not include the time I spent outside the school learning IT on my own.

Clearly the solution was either to return to being only a physics teacher, or to ditch teaching and become a full-time tech coordinator. I couldn’t make up my mind which to do, and my administration was not being especially helpful in making the decision. I had the clear sense that my bosses preferred keeping me in both positions, despite my protests that doing two full-time jobs at the same time meant I was doing neither job to the fullest.

And so, at some point in 2007, the job stopped being fun. I still loved my students, still loved my subjects, still respected my colleagues, but I was now showing up to work out of a sense of duty, not out of a sense of self-gratification. It was about this time that the opportunity came to teach in China, which led me to my current position far from physics, IT management, and the United States.

In her essay, Fine mentions the seeming lack of respect Americans have for teachers. To a large extent, I agree. In the USA, people suggest that “those who can’t, teach,” or that teachers could certainly be doing something better with their lives. As one writer once noted, telling someone at a party you are a teacher is a conversation killer, because everyone “knows” what teachers do, and it is seldom interesting, so they feel there is nothing to talk about. Since everyone has gone to school, they also assume they know as much as professionals about what is wrong with America’s schools, but are seldom willing to hear what actual teachers have to say. In the USA, teachers are simultaneously the hired help and master craftsmen, mistrusted and respected, overworked and underpaid.

The culture in China is different. Teaching here is respected, and teachers, too. You can be a complete flop in the classroom, but you will be respected as a teacher. (Of course, you will get more respect if you are a good teacher!) While teaching in China will not make anyone wealthy, the pay is at least commensurate with the social standing of a teacher. As a university professor, I make quite a bit more than most government workers and certainly much more than the median income in this rural part of Hunan.

And I am obligated to teach no more than 18 hours a week. If I need to teach more hours, my contract stipulates I must be paid pro rata. And a 5% raise is automatic. There’s none of the “will we have enough money to pay the teachers, much less give them a nominal raise?” anxiety I endured for 23 years previously.

So, I am still a teacher, now beginning my 25th year in the profession. I have some regrets that I am not serving that symbolic anniversary back at my former school, but only a few. A burned-out teacher has little to offer his school, after all.