There is an incredible group of articles on Yahoo! News this week on teaching (see below). The basic point is that teaching is not only one of the top, if not the top, stress-inducing jobs in the country. In my view it is certainly the most dysfunctional.
I didn’t say “in the world” above because it’s not. But in the U.S. the education overlords have made it almost impossible to even survive the profession intact all the way to the end of a career. One million teachers, a record high, quit the profession in 2018.
As I look back, I see a disaster that I lived through unconsciously. For four decades, I thought that that kind of stress was normal. Now I realize that it wasn’t. One of the biggest culprits besides low salaries and long hours of work at home is the testing requirements, which I now see as a manifestation by people in power with nothing else to do than try to control people much better than them. They and the textbook lobby have ruined the profession, making it impossible for us to actually teach.
Now, so long after teaching my first class in 1977 I am overcome this morning with the deepest sadness for myself, for putting myself through that all those years, through those 35,000+ classes. I won’t attempt to describe how my career mainly in high schools but also in middle schools has affected my physical body, and I am a strong person. That alone made it not worth it.
The problem is that, as with all victims, we think that we are the only ones going through it. We think it’s just our school, or the district we are in. It’s not. It’s a systemic nationwide malady. There are very few, if any, healthy schools. Just think! The entire nation and millions upon millions of kids and teachers are in kind of hell states today as they begin another week in a hellish predicament that they can’t get out of.
I respect myself so much more now. This one thought, these articles below on the state of the profession, have in an odd way completely freed me. It’s so hard to express. I thought it was me all along, not able to measure up to the challenges of a demanding profession, and now I have discovered that it’s not me.
What was it then? It was a broken system in a hell state that I was lucky to survive on both a physical level (no hyperbole there) and on a mental level. Only God knows how I survived it. He knows because He, the goal of all my striving, was the very one who carried me to the end of every dark day of pain and approval-seeking, no matter how sunny it was outside.
After reading all these Yahoo News articles, it’s like all the pressure of “not being good enough” has been lifted from my shoulders. I respect myself so much more now. I don’t need the approval that I thought I did from “superiors” who in truth and in fact were vastly inferior to me, as I now see the truth clearly. I am free.