The Emotional Demand of Teaching

In his recent NY Times op-ed, “In Honor of Teachers,” Charles M. Blow addresses why so few people enter the teaching profession and why, of those that do, half leave within the first five years. In response to his own inquiry, he reveals the many arduous (though often ignored) demands on teachers: poor working conditions, long hours hours, less pay, lack of professional credibility. Importantly, he poses the following question which gets to the heart of the issue:

...how do we expect to entice the best and brightest to become teachers when we keep tearing the profession down? We take the people who so desperately want to make a difference that they enter a field where they know that they’ll be overworked and underpaid, and we scapegoat them as the cause of a societywide failure.

I'm sure by now you all can hear my pseudo-beatnik-agreement-snapping from wherever you are in the country (hopefully you are doing the same but with more style). This article got me thinking, however, about an under-reported difficulty of teaching not addressed here: emotional stress. I think that it is this stress, as much as the issues enumerated above, which contributes to high teacher burnout and turnover.

I present here two problems which most represent the high emotional demands on teachers:

Reflections on the TFA/Penn Summer Bridge Course aka Notes on Education

Yesterday, I finished up my duties as Teacher Assistant for the Penn Graduate School of Education Summer Bridge Course for incoming 2011 Teach for America corps members.  The course is designed to be a week-long intensive introduction to the academic work corps members will engage in over the following two years at Penn GSE. Focusing on issues of pedagogical theory, it tends to be quite different from TFA's summer institute (teacher boot camp, for those non-familiar), which is more of a practical “how-to” on teaching in the classroom.

Throughout the week, we (the facilitators and TAs) demonstrated creative methods and strategies for teaching, but, more importantly, encouraged a critical discourse around issues of testing, grading, creativity within the classroom, the importance of multiple perspectives, race and racial tensions, privilege, and inquiry-based learning. We asked the tough questions. Who are we as teachers? Who are our students? How will we form the trusting relationships and community that will allow true learning to flourish? The new corps members really pushed themselves to answer these and more. At times the conversation was frustrating, as it must be when discussing the myriad of challenges that face urban teachers and students, but it ultimately forged deeper understanding and renewed commitment to exact social change within our schools.

In my opinion, we created a really positive, productive, and powerful (sorry for the alliteration; I'm an English teacher) learning community in our week together. I am left believing that the 2011 TFA Greater Philadelphia Corps is going to do great things.

With that, here were some of the take-aways from the week that deserve note: