“What do you teach?” The professor pointed around the room, getting the standard answers he expected.
“Math”
“P.E.”
“Music.”
“You know what I teach?” he said. “I teach children.”
It’s an old anecdote and one I’ve experienced firsthand as part of my credential program (for those who don’t know me, I was a credentialed public school teacher), but it’s also a possibly dangerous message, depending on how the recipient receives it.
Teachers should keep the learner, not just the subject, in mind.
That’s a great message to take away from it. However, I realized as I got more involved in the teaching profession that most of my peers took something completely different away from “I teach children,” specifically that they ought to have some sort of personal relationship with the student, that teaching is about meeting the child’s needs in an expansive and inclusive sense, not just effectively communicating knowledge, building skills, and certifying mastery.
This attitude, which is common among younger teachers, is, I believe, the main reason so many teachers are unsatisfied with their profession, burned out, and quitting. There is always more to the equation (admin and working conditions), but from my personal experience and a casual survey of personal stories on social media, the idea of teaching most teachers embrace is the source of their misery.
So you may hear about teachers quitting the profession or, recently, “quiet quitting.”
“Quiet quitting” is a term I came across a few years ago and never looked into. I assumed it meant something like Office Space, where you show up to your job and do nothing, waiting to be fired. As it turns out, it just means “doing your job and nothing more.” I found this bizarre because I always thought that was just called being an employee.
However, I realized that 90s kids, and to a lesser extent 80s kids, were raised to think that the appropriate approach to professional environments is to have full personal commitment to the company and job. That is, to believe in the mission and have a spiritual investment in the organization’s success. It took a global pandemic for many workers to finally accept that the large corporation they worked for was not, in fact, a family, and their employer really didn’t give a shit about them or how much extra work they did or how much they believed in the mission or cared about the product.
When you think about the life of a kid in the 90s and 2000s, inappropriate attachment should be expected. This is the daycare generation. As a teacher in the 2000s, I had many students (especially private guitar students) who got up at six and got home at nine at night. Their whole day was school, after-school sports or daycare, a private sport, boy scouts, piano lessons, etc., etc. The time they spent with their parents was dinner and car trips between activities.
As an 80s kid, I can see both the cynicism of the latchkey kid, who realized early on that nobody really cares what you do, and the daycare kid, whose whole life was a carefully managed set of activities and supervised time. All of us were missing our parents, so… yeah, attachment issues.
For the millennial, family was the classroom, mom was the teacher, and the uncles were coaches. This misplaced attachment, thus, naturally manifests in the inspiration to become a teacher. When you understand it’s a ricochet off the natural desire for marriage and children, it makes a lot of sense.
Teachers of the younger generations thus enter the field believing first in the mission in their mind: helping kids. This is reinforced by political rhetoric (remember where your union dues go as a teacher) about teachers having the most important jobs because they are molding the next generation. Such an open-ended and idealistic view of a job is bound to destroy the personal boundaries necessary to both do the job properly and remain sane.
When teachers talk about burnout, a few themes emerge. First, the job takes too much time. Second, they get emotionally exhausted from the constant difficulty of trying (and failing) to help kids. Third, the bad environment that is the reality of a compulsory public school. Last is pay.
Personal boundaries can assist with all of these (even pay, which I’ll elaborate on), but teachers are not good at establishing boundaries and framing their jobs according to understandable goals and hard limitations.
How much time does it take to teach?
Well, the job is anywhere from 35 hours per week to infinity. Teachers have a tendency to detonate their personal lives to fulfill what they think their responsibilities are. They grade, make materials, and plan lessons on their own time. They stay after school to run clubs or help struggling kids. They attend school activities like sporting events when there is no contract requirement to do so. A good teacher has to do all these things! It’s for the kids!
Administration and the teaching culture, in general, reinforce this attitude. “We’re a family!” is a slogan you might see posted on the office bulletin board, echoed by individual teachers – this classroom is a family. I remember this being a school slogan for a year in 1999, shortly before I graduated high school. “We are family!” (they used the song at rallies). “What a fucking joke,” we all said, not realizing what was coming down the pipe for those who followed.
Besides being wildly inappropriate to equate yourself as a teacher or your classroom to a real family, it’s an express highway to personal hell paved with your good intentions.
Teachers have prep periods to do their work and have to stay after school, usually for an hour and a half, to make an 8-hour working day. Good personal boundaries would mean assuming those hours as a hard limitation and building your coursework around those limitations. If you are spending time outside of those hours grading, assign less work that you need to grade. You should stop giving out homework entirely anyway, but that’s a different essay. You don’t need to go to the football game. You don’t need to volunteer for duties. You can use google classroom quizzes. You can use scantrons. You can use grading rubrics. You can make the grade dependent on assessments and not mounds of homework.
So that’s “quiet quitting” for teachers: working within the limits of the job and having actual boundaries for your time. The truth is, nobody cares about whether you went to the football game. Chances are, nobody will even remember you were there in a week. No child will complain that you don’t assign homework; parents probably won’t mind either. Nobody cares that you used scantrons instead of checking every step of a student’s work. Nobody cares that you didn’t mark up an essay with every complaint. Admin mostly cares that A) you have good classroom management and B) you are teaching to the standards, at least when they observe you. The vast majority of admin problems with teachers are in the area of classroom management, not teaching style or grading. It makes sense - you can’t be an effective teacher without having an orderly classroom.
I’m for doing your job with maximum competency within its specifications and limitations. If the employer cannot align their expectations with your resources, that’s their problem, not yours. That goes double for schools, but this lack of boundaries is mostly something teachers take upon themselves, not the result of contracts.
Emotional burnout from teaching is very real and, again, is the result of bad boundaries. The fact is, you are not the students’ parent, even if their real parents are missing or bad. You are their teacher, which means you have professional obligations to them, not personal ones. If the student needs counseling, refer them to the school psychologist; you are not trained to deal with that, nor are you obligated to step into that role, and you may, in fact, be risking litigation as a teacher by crossing that line.
These boundaries are internal as much as external. Emotional compartmentalization is a necessity for anyone who wants to be a teacher. You can’t help every kid who comes in through the door. Accept it and do what you can, but forgive yourself when things don’t turn out the way you would prefer. How do you think doctors and nurses do their jobs?
Lack of emotional boundaries, besides putting an undue burden on the teacher, can risk your very career. I’ve known several teachers who have lost jobs due to improper personal (not sexual) relationships with students. If a student has your cell number, you’ve done something wrong. I don’t doubt a professional ethics course would be a much better part of a teacher prep program than something like “Diversity and Equity,” which only reinforces the idea that the teacher is a magistrate, not a professional.
But I want to help kids!
You help them by doing your job, which is to teach your assigned subject according to the standards approved by the state. If you find that too restrictive, try ignoring the standards (if you have tenure, it’s rather difficult to get fired), or think about a different job. The idea of the teacher you get from inspirational movies is not the real job, and it is perfectly fine to choose another career. You are not a bad person or “giving up on your kids” by doing something that suits you better.
The bad environment in education can be helped by classroom management, which is another kind of boundary-setting, this time on the students’ behavior. If you have an orderly classroom, it takes A LOT of the stress out of the job. If you have a system and plan to deal with the trouble kids, it makes school much more fun for the other children, and yourself. Most of the sleep I’ve lost as a teacher was trying to solve the big problem of classroom management, but when the system works, the job becomes easy. And to be clear, I didn’t just teach at the college level; I taught at a Title I high school full of social problems. I’ve been in rough places and managed to make the classroom safe and orderly, and as a music teacher, I often had more than 50 students at a time.
I think the truth is that teachers don’t want to do classroom management because they want kids to behave and learn because they are intrinsically interested in it or personally like the teacher and want to please her. Again, there is a problem with boundaries and personal attachment. They are your students, not your kids. Be a professional. That means running things like a boot camp if necessary. Kids will actually like you better if the classroom is well-managed.
Low pay is another common complaint. Anyone wondering how much teachers get paid can look up the local salary schedules. They are based on years taught and education level, plus certain kinds of stipends. That final sum could be a lot or a little depending on how well-educated the teacher is, not how good he is at his job or how much time he spends grading papers. Even pay-for-performance schemes, of which I have participated and benefited, do little to change the disconnect between teacher performance and pay.
So yes, your pay is often a matter of boundaries when you are a teacher because of time. If you work your contract hours and consider all the holidays you have as extra time to either relax or engage in a secondary job, it pays pretty well. When teachers complain about low pay, they are usually making a judgment that the effort, time, and personal stress they are putting into the job should demand more compensation than what they are getting. This is valid. A highly stressful job ought to pay more.
So, if you can’t “quiet quit” as a teacher, you can quit for real. If the dream was not what was sold to you, not what you imagined, it’s good to find something else to do where you can actually be effective and not turn into a personal wreck trying to push beyond very harsh limitations. In the modern world, teaching is a profession for people who have great personal boundaries, good time management, assertive personal affect, and a good portion of Machiavellianism. If you are an idealist, you’d best look elsewhere.
That being said, teaching is one of those professions where there is a feeling of personal identity associated with the job. “I am a teacher” is more than just saying. “I am a software engineer” to most in the profession. Teachers need to have more personal separation from the job, and that includes personal identity. If your ego is dependent on being a teacher, giving that up can create a lot of grief, but is that grief, likely temporary, worse than the endless grind?
I’ve known a few teachers personally that are quite miserable in the job, but they don’t quit? Why? Well, first, there is a feeling when you are a teacher that you have no other skills. Most teachers go directly from college to the classroom, with the only other work experience being part-time or dead-end wage work. That brings me to the second reason they stay – the pay and benefits. The problem with quitting is finding another job that pays just as well with as generous a benefit and retirement plan as teaching. It always seems like you’d need a whole second degree to jump off the bandwagon.
There are entire sites dedicated to helping teachers quit. That’s how bad many teachers view their situation and their jobs. This has a lot of implications beyond just the well-being of the instructor.
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A brilliant analysis! My experience on the field is in 100% agreement.
On they pay issue I'd add that a wise teacher always keeps in mind his hourly wage. I.e. the more you plan and grade and do extra, the less pay per hour you get.
This should not dishearten, but instead it should push the teacher to prioritize and get more efficient at the job. A teacher's hourly wage can be quite reasonable, provided he gets serious with efficiency.
Also, I've noted a pronounced gender difference here. Male teachers have less trouble with comparmentalizing the work in their minds, and less trouble prioritizing their work. With female teachers the stress levels tend to be huge, and often they attempt to be caretakers for the kids, and maintain a sort of "straight-A's good girl" mentality they developed back in school.
That mentality does not help them at all at work, instead becoming crushingly stressful. Extra grueling when they notice the seemingly "lazy" male teachers are better in tune with their jobs and deal better with the kids.
My daughter is getting into elementary education. So, I'm going to share your insights with her. Thank you!!