Member-only story
Why I Keep Teaching Even Though I Don’t Want to Be a Teacher Any More
I fantasize about quitting every day.
Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? Yes, it is good for the soul to do a job that has the potential to help lots of people every day. But that alone can’t sustain a person forever. Even the kindest, most patient and enlightened teacher has to be affected by the constant heartbreak that comes with being a teacher in America today.
And some of that is by design. The current employment model in education is designed to create the kind of burnout that leads pretty predictably to turnover, because administrators these days don’t think twice about using abuse to drive down labor costs. Hire a naïve teacher fresh out of school, make it impossible for them to do their job well, and just wait for them to quit in about 5 years. Then you can hire someone new and cheap.
And that’s really the least unsavory management practice you can observe at a typical school. Lean thinking, which celebrates exploiting and inconveniencing workers in the name of efficiency, has infiltrated higher education, and it can be seen in practices such as overloads, where full-time teachers are pressured to teach extra classes at part-time pay.
