When I was a student at university, studying to become an educator, my professors had plenty of advice. Suggestions about avoiding the teacher’s lounge your first year, about always providing positive feedback, about switching off on the weekends to save your sanity. Those were fantastic suggestions that I have taken to heart (although, especially when it comes to switching off on the weekends, I have become a bit notorious for not doing that lately). But there’s a lot of things they don’t tell you about teaching, both good and bad, and it can come as a shock, especially when you’re first starting out.
The Constant Pressure
Maybe if you peruse social media and follow other educators, this doesn’t come as much of a surprise to you. But when I first started out, somewhat early in the days of teachers really taking to social media, we weren’t really told that sort of thing. Even during student teaching, we were shielded from all of the extra – most of the time we were told not to attend all the staff meetings, we weren’t given duties, and we didn’t have requirements to attend extra professional developments or trainings. In short, there was a lot we weren’t shown.
Teaching comes with a lot of pressure. For starters, there’s the pressure you place on yourself: you want to be a good teacher, so you take that extra few minutes to really spruce up a presentation; you spend hours poring over student work and giving them detailed feedback; you have restless nights worrying about whether you’re really prepared for class the next week or if everything you’ve made is going to fall apart into a horrible abyss. There’s also the pressure that comes from your administrators – the duties, the meetings, the expectations to have a certain amount of passing students and to have a damn good explanation why the kid on the soccer team is failing your class and were you making sure they were attending tutorials were you calling home were you doing absolutely everything you could to make sure this kid passes because he’s a great player and the coach is gonna be mad if he can’t play and-
You get the idea.
There’s also the pressure of wanting to make sure your students are okay. Especially in these strange times, they’re going through a lot! It’s tough to meet that balance of still maintaining a rigorous curriculum as required by the higher-ups while also ensuring that their social-emotional needs are met. Little things, like giving students just a few minute break before the bell releases them to their next class, can have a huge positive impact. The pressure to ensure your students’ well-being is enormous right now, which leads me to my next point:
Try as you can, you aren’t responsible for your students’ actions
Especially if you’re working with older students – in middle school or high school – the epiphany you have to eventually realize is that you have very little control over the type of person they are (and from what some of my colleagues have said that teach the little ones, this is still true even then). They are independent beings, and the sooner you realize that, the better off you’ll be.
On the one hand, it can be easy to feel like you are solely responsible for their successes when they’re doing well. A former student of yours was accepted to Yale, Harvard, and Brown? Clearly that is all because I did such a brilliant job teaching them. A current student wins an award for poetry writing? Obviously you had everything to do with that.
I mean, yes, you had an impact. Positive teachers have an enormously awesome influence, and that does trickle down and help students towards being successful.
But when students leave your classroom, especially years later, you need to admit to yourself that their choices aren’t your fault.
I say this because I just found out some news about two former students of mine that was distressing: they were arrested for murdering another kid their age. I mean, even without the connection, that news is distressing, especially with the onslaught of negative media we’re so used to seeing all the time. But because I knew those kids, because they were students of mine, in my classroom, it hit home. Sure, it’s been two years now since I’ve been their teacher. Obviously a lot can happen in two years (for a positive example: I got married, yo!).
But it still hurts.
Honestly, my wife was the one who snapped me out of this funk (at least a little – it definitely lingers) and made me properly realize: what they did was not my fault. I did what I could for those students. I tried to get them the help they needed. I tried to give them opportunities to speak, to listen to them and hear their problems. I really tried to make a positive difference.
But in the end, there is only so much you can do. And that realization sucks, but is also empowering.
Sure, we can revel in our students’ success stories. And we can find grief in their losses. But we shouldn’t take it personally. They are independent people, living independent lives. If we tried to take responsibility for everything every student we’ve ever taught has done, we would explode from stress.
And that leaves me with my final point.
Teaching is still wonderful, despite it all
No matter how much stress or hardship this career causes me, I still wouldn’t change it for the world. There are times I genuinely want to quit, to pack it all up and do literally anything else – heck, become an alpaca farmer, I dunno – but those times pass when I actually get to teach. To see my students grow and become better and better.
I’ll be honest with you right now: I’m exhausted. I feel beat down. I don’t know a single other teacher who doesn’t feel the same way. And yet, at the same time, I enjoy coming and teaching every day. Sure, maybe I’d rather it be entirely online given the whole pandemic situation. But I don’t want to ever stop teaching. It means too much.
Jacob Ryckman 