Chris writes (in response to Dan (in response to Chris . . . you get the point)): #
Chris: Which brings me to my next point: #Read the rest. It’s an interesting conversation about teaching and the people involved. It’s also a big ol’ complicated argument. Full of passion. Literally dripping with big, gummy gobs of the stuff. (I hope I’ve permission to use such words. Let me know, okay, Dan?) #Dan: We need to avoid terminology like "passion" in describing the prerequisites of our job. #
Chris (This is my favorite part – Bud): The hell we do. #We need passion. I want passionate teachers. I want teachers who love
#
the stuff they teach, but who love the kids they teach even more. I
want teachers who can’t wait to get into the classroom. I want teachers
who think powerfully and deeply about their unit plans. I want teachers
who believe deeply in what we do, and who work hard to do it. I want
teachers who care and who inspire kids to care.
I would have to agree most whole-heartedly with the “The Hell we Do!”
Even more specifically, no matter how plainly teachers feel these things, we need to stop calling our job “a calling.”
What I’m really tired of is seeing people come off the street into the teaching profession and thinking it will be a piece of cake. It is these people who are getting eaten up in their first year and having to leave mid-year. I will follow that pretty bold statement up with that I’m generalizing. I have met many Alternative Certification educator that have worked out pretty well. Just playing the odds here!
I will say I’m sorry if I offend anyone with this post. The first college professor I had entering my ed. program started off the semester by saying, “If you are here to make a boatload of money in a career I suggest you leave, go to the registrar’s office and change majors to engineering, law, or pre-med, because you are not going to make it here. IF you want to make a difference in the life of a child, or children, then sit back and let’s start your journey together, right now.” I’ve always adhered to the last part of that statement. So yes…I do think it’s a calling that NOT everyone is meant to be in. That’s why there are some that are MEANT to be teachers and some who just don’t muster.
Absolutely. I don’t really know what a “calling” is, but I do know this: I have a lot of friends who are very intelligent and who work in the finance industry (here in the NYC suburbs, you meet a lot of people like that). When they give me a hard time (with love, always with love) about having summers off, Christmas vacation, etc, I always tell them that there’s a need for math, technology, and business teachers at high schools all over the area. The typical (paraphrased) response? “I couldn’t do what you do all day.”
That’s true. Raising teacher salaries certainly would encourage more people to consider teaching as a career, but I don’t know that it’d keep more in the profession. It really does take someone with a sense of purpose, a willingness to sacrifice (aside on that–last night a friend and I discussed, over grownup sodas, ways in which we could begin to discourage the “honor in overwork” attitude that prevails at our school) the opportunity to make lots of money, and, dare I say it, passion. The day I lose my passion for teaching, for working with teenagers as they discover new ways of thinking about and organizing their worlds, is the day I go back to technical writing.
Dan might have some valid points somewhere, but his arguments are buried in invective and pointless baiting of his chosen adversaries. I’ve made the point on my blog that we need to keep our conversations civil, since there are students reading (a consequence of so many of us encouraging our students to become bloggers is that they have become bloggers).
Bud, you run a nice clean family blog here and I appreciate the mood.
A comment in a week-old post like this feels something like a personal e-mail, Bud, so I’m going to break with my usually bold online posture and, with all sincerity and for the first time, predict that I’m done teaching inside two years. I can’t take it anymore. I can take the hours, I can take the pay, but I can’t take this.
I’d have to take off my socks to count how many times my comments at Chris’ blog have been twisted to suit various commenter’s agendas. It’s somehow surreal to me that after hours of drafting all of these educators have concluded I sincerely want to rid the profession of passion. More’s the pity how everyone has fallen over Chris’ rejoinder. “The hell we do,” he says, and we all slap his back and holler, “Get ‘im, Chris!” He then gives a great post explaining why teaching needs passion, but my excerpt is plainly about “terminology like ‘passion’” and not passion itself.
In my workplace and around the blogosphere, I find teachers eagerly propagating the nobility of the teacher, the tragic, underappreciated condition of the teacher, the passion of the teacher, the artistry of the teacher, and then going the extra mile to misconstrue and marginalize my outlying objection to what I perceive to be a pervasive complex of martyrdom.
Likewise above, I can count on one hand the number of educators I’ve met (in real life or around here) who believe that hard work trumps passion in this job, that the latter follows the former, that caring’s the easy part, that “passion” has become loosely defined through overuse. And even then I’d have three fingers I wouldn’t know what to do with.
More and more, I find myself approaching this job so differently from my co-workers and co-bloggers, which wouldn’t be so bad if both groups didn’t find it so easy to marginalize my entire raison d’être. It’s not you guys who need to change, though, it’s me. You all need me a helluva lot less than I need some connection to you. Just the same, I only have so much stomach for this kind of detachment. Two years worth, tops.