We Are Not Loved

A few days ago, while at school, I cried. This is a weird thing for me to admit, not because I am afraid of my emotions, but because I realized at that moment how much my job has brought me to tears this school year.

I don’t expect to find perfect happiness as a teacher. The job requires a certain amount of emotional battery, but what has changed is the frequency and the intensity of my sadness. When I think through my six-year teaching career I remember my first and second years of teaching as particularly tough emotionally. I cried plenty of times, often over failed lessons, tough interactions with kids, and at the feeling of my own inadequacy. This is expected in a way, with the belief that I often told myself that as I grew in experience, the tears would be less, and the success and happiness would follow.

That has not been the case. What I have found is an evolving consciousness of the issues pressing down on teachers. The issue facing teaching is that the selling points of teaching are being outweighed by everything else that surrounds teaching.

I realized a few days ago that while I love teaching, often I feel teaching does not love me back.

I want to be clear about what this means, as I spent basically the entire school year trying to figure out for myself what this truly means. This is because I often feel intense love for parts of teaching. The love I feel from my students is real. The appreciation I feel from many parents is genuine. The care my fellow teachers show me truly makes it feel like I have people I can rely upon. The flaws in teaching come from how the profession was set up to fail in our country very slowly and to mask the solution as teachers and administrators putting in more hours.

Imagining the perfect version of teaching, for both students and teachers, would be a classroom of around 16 students taught by a teacher who teaches about 3–4 times a day out of the 7–8 hour school day. This would allow teachers to have a much more manageable load of students in which they can get to know a lot better, support them individually, grade their work, and provide feedback at a more consistent level. This also gives teachers enough time to plan and grade at school so that when they leave they can actually recharge and feel prepared for the next day. A school’s teaching staff would be large and diverse so that students see themselves in their teachers, and teachers have a team to rely on.

This perfect teacher day would be matched with an abundance of school therapists, who can help the many kids who face trauma and difficulty managing their emotions. Kids would have meals that were full of fruits, vegetables, and a well-cooked main course. School buildings would be larger, to accommodate more classes that are smaller, as well as having more gym and activity space for kids to play and unwind.

Those are all just very basic things that would help our students and teachers immensely. But that would require money. Money that state and federal governments are loath to provide. Instead, we have a great tightening of budgets. Teacher pay cut, teacher jobs cut, classes sizes increased, schools closed, extracurriculars and support staff cut. Everyone is forced to do more, with less time, and less pay.

And if you rage against those changes, then you hate students. See, the government and even at times administration have found an amazing tool to use against teachers who realize the profession is set up to bleed them dry and that is guilt. If you love students, then you should be willing to put up with every abuse right? If you demand better, then you are in this profession for the wrong reason. It is as brilliant a tactic as it is depraved.

And it has led me to fall in love with a job that abuses me and every other teacher in America. This year we have faced a student population that is in need of so much mental and emotional support that teachers cannot provide, with not enough counselors to support. This year we have faced salaries that are still extremely low for a profession that prepares the future of our country. This year we have faced state governments and parents accusing us of brainwashing and wanting to legislate each part of our career. This year we have faced continued violence in our schools with barely a response. This year we have faced demands of catching students up to academic standards set by a government that never sets foot in a classroom, while many students are still grappling with issues that cannot be ignored. This year we have teachers and students out with covid leading to teachers covering multiple classes a day, with half the class gone cause they are sick. This year we have faced an administrative response that often amounts to some new snacks and outside consultants who have us sit in meetings when I still have a mountain of grading and data response to do.

But the thing is, those things happened in previous years, we all just kind of hoped they would stop. We hoped that someone would stand up one day and make it stop, that our entire nation would collectively wake up and realize that making the job that allows parents to work during the day and kids to be prepared for their futures one of the most looked down upon careers in the country a bad idea. But no one has shown up and facing these issues getting worse, many teachers are just quitting. There are not enough new teachers to fill the gaps as wanting to become a teacher has been looked at as a terrible career choice for more than a decade. This is stretching thin already thin staff at most schools. People are barely making it, we are just trying to survive.

Teachers are not loved. If we were loved, then we would be funded like our military. If we were loved, our career would be set up to be sustainable and allow us to improve our craft instead of just surviving. If we were loved, other people from school administrators, to state government, to federal officials would stand up for us.

But they haven’t. So we need to stand up for ourselves so that the career that we love will finally love us back.