While I’m complaining, I may as well add one more. This feature of classroom teaching is one of the most difficult to manage, and it is another aspect of this profession that I think most people don’t understand. It certainly contributes to the fast burnout of many young idealists, and maybe also to the subtle but pervasive battiness of many old, successful teachers.
Rather than explaining it myself, I’ll quote from Teachers Have It Easy: the big sacrifices and small salaries of America’s teachers (Daniel Moulthrop, Nínive Clements Calegari, Dave Eggers). The rest of the book is mostly like this excerpt: brief testimony from teachers, with chapter introductions and interstitial commentary from the editors.
Julia Normand, 65, English—Goldenview Middle School,
Anchorage, AlaskaWhen I was working at a law firm as a computer-support person, my typical day amounted to coming to my desk with a cup of coffee and a roll. I’d sit down and go through messages, drinking my coffee. I’d greet my co-workers when they came in; I’d make a phone call to set up a meeting and plan my day. If I had to go to the bathroom, I just got up and went. I was in charge of my own body, my own life, and my own schedule. I had certain things to get done, and if it took longer than a day, I got paid overtime for it. It was a high-pressure job in many ways, but not in terms of having thirty people needing your attention immediately and knowing that legally, I’m required to be in the room. As a teacher, if I step out of the room to go to the bathroom and something happens, legally, I’m responsible.
It’s just such a different thing. You feel like a person when you’re working at another job, and you don’t feel like a person when you’re teaching. It feels like being a train. Somebody switches it on, and it’s moving and you had better keep running. You don’t have the option to make a personal choice like “I think I’ll put this off until tomorrow.” There are thirty people, and they need things. You go with it all day.
I guess the equivalent might be if thirty people called me at the same time to tell me their computers crashed. But that’s just impossible. The network could go down and thirty people could call, but there’d be five or six of us in the IT department who would go troubleshoot it and one person would man the phones and say to people, “This is probably what we think is happening, it’ll probably be about fifteen minutes, we’ll let you know.” You work at high speed on it, but it’s not thirty people standing over you wanting immediate attention.
Teachers are required by law to stay within their classrooms. They are responsible for anything that happens when a student is in their charge. This is a reasonable requirement, yet because there aren’t reasonable breaks in school schedules, teachers often lack the basic liberties most occupations take for granted.Few other professionals see thirty or more clients at once, all with different needs, some of whom may be determined to work counter to your goals. The combination of these factors can be stressful, to say the least—especially when there is no possibility, for hours on end, of respite.
pp. 116–118
I definitely felt like this when I started working at a web job after a year of part-time teaching: like I was working for myself in a way I hadn’t before. And those little things like coffee and rolls and deciding one’s own day make a big difference.
Now, to be fair, there are many, many jobs in this country that don’t offer the large amount of freedom and self-determination that the majority of office jobs do. Garbage collectors, receptionists, dentists, and lots of other people are bound to schedules, running to keep up with trains in a manner similar to teachers.
I can’t deny the incredible luxury of the American office job. It’s not a luxury that (usually) involves laziness, but it does involve a tremendous amount of autonomy.
I do agree that many jobs are in some ways like “running to keep up with trains.” I worked in construction over the summers to pay for college, and though not all the jobs I did had this character, one I did for several of those summers certainly did. I was a “finish plumber,” installing fixtures (sinks, toilets, baths/showers, water heaters etc.) in the last stages of construction in new housing developments. We generally were one or two guys to a house, and were generally expected to finish a house in a day. Sometimes that was easy, as in a small house with two and a half bathrooms; sometimes it was very hard, and we didn’t finish. But there would be another house the next day, whether we finished today’s or not, and sometimes we just had to hurry back and finish the last house before starting the new one. A lot of times I was stressed out and hated it.
But still, I was usually the only one in a quiet room, or sometimes one of two in the room, each of us doing our own thing. If I wanted just to sit and catch my breath for a minute, I could. Sometimes my partner would step outside for a cigarette break, or I would stand at a window or balcony and stare out and listen to the strange quiet, or the distant construction noises. If someone had to pee, he just peed. There were consequences for moving too slowly, but, like the excerpt suggests, there were not thirty people in the room making demands, requiring impossibly individualized attention, a few of them (one hopes it’s only a few) actively working to thwart your efforts. I was struck when I began teaching by how much of a performance it is, the teacher like an actor on a stage; and it is one that lasts all day, with infrequent breaks (or sometimes none), with at least a captive and easily bored audience, often an openly hostile one.
Though it may sound silly, I have worked eight-hour days racing the clock—and in fact digging holes and pulling heavy cable (literally)—and I never went home as psychically drained or to bed as exhausted as I regularly do as a teacher. My present teaching situation is vastly better than some of my former ones (and even some of my former ones vastly better than some of my first ones). Still, there are days when I fantasize about installing toilets or digging holes.
I can sympathize with a lot of the feelings you describe about teaching despite (to make sure I emphasize it enough) the enormously smaller scale of my own experience teaching. I spent my mornings preparing for the English class I taught, then I spent my afternoons and evening trying to shepherd 2 – 7 at-risk kids through various community service activities.
I taught full days as a substitute frequently during that year (and for a month or so when I got back from the Peace Corps), and know how draining a full day’s teaching can feel. The difference for me, of course, was that no class had more than twenty students, and the whole context of the private school where I taught was set up to be supportive of its teachers and students. That year I wished more than anything that I just had a full-time job teaching, which was vastly more fulfilling than the comically impossible job of working with the at-risk kids.
All this is to say that the terribleness of the teacher’s particular train seems partially due to some well known, traditional complaints: there are just too many kids and not enough support. And there need to be fewer kids and more support in proportion to how challenged the particular kids are. Career teachers at the school where I taught were not terribly well paid, but they were given an essentially manageable task with significant personal rewards.
As to the trades, I’m assuming you’ve heard of (or even read) Shop Class as Soulcraft, a book written by a disenchanted academic who became a motorcycle mechanic. It talks about the immense role of independence and exercising of personal judgment in one’s personal happiness, something that is present to significant degrees in many jobs that are not esteemed terribly highly in our culture, and the terrible dehumanizing present in many of the “knowledge worker” jobs that are supposed to be so fantastic.
Though my tools are almost all on a computer, I’m a tradesman myself, and I can honestly say that not a day goes by that I’m not struck by what a good situation it is. Using tools to solve problems and build stuff.
Just getting around to reading this entry. It hits the nail right square on the head.
Like the teacher in Alaska, I also had a very stressful job managing design and production for a million $ or so worth of publications for a nonprofit. Loads of tight deadlines, creativity on demand, managing other people, press or advertiser problem emergencies: the whole nine yards. And yet, of all the life-adjustments I had to make to come to MTC, the one I found the most difficult was exactly as she says: Not having a shred of autonomy in my job. Even the year I took “off” between career and Mississippi when I unloaded retail freight on a dock at 4 a.m. allowed me to have basic human needs.
Another thing that struck me (and I think I might have blogged it at some point) is that we, as teachers, are both isolated from and inundated by humanity. Some days I am so lonely for the social aspects of a “normal” workplace but then when I get home I don’t want to be touched or spoken to.
And of course, all of these traits are made that much worse by the particulars of teaching in critical needs schools. Other (suburban or upper-class private) career teachers I know are surprised that I don’t get even a short lunch break, not to mention the dearth of a real peer group as colleagues.