If you don’t figure out how to love teaching, with all of its obstacles and insults, then your students will not love learning. Your misery translates to their failures. This blog is meant to help new teachers and veterans navigate through this difficult yet rewarding career. It is also meant to challenge the past practices in our schools that do not work, while highlighting those that do. I plan to celebrate as well as reprimand, and I hope, that with honesty, I can enable change.
According to the National Education Association, 20% of all new teachers leave within three years, while 9% won’t make it to the end of their first year. When one analyzes urban schools, the numbers are even more extreme: approximately 50% leave the profession within five years. This is a disturbing statistic yet one we are all familiar with.
If we disseminate a school as a business model, the students’ suffering adds up to an unsuccessful business. It looks like this:
Unhappy teacher = unhappy student = cruddy test scores = unsuccessful school
And don’t even start with that old argument of “a school is more then just test scores.” Of course it is. We know that a whole student is not one that only knows how to take tests; but a school with happy students that can’t take a bubble test might be a cool place to hang out in, but it is not what we call a successful school.
This blog is meant to be a place to discuss some of these issues that plague all schools and districts. I will share what works for me, what keeps me happy, what keeps me wanting to work hard, and what keeps me the level of teacher that I can be proud of.
It all translates to the success of my students. And let’s face it, their success, their true success, as lifelong learners and people who intrinsically want to succeed, helps me achieve my own happiness. I’m selfish that way. I’m not interested in being miserable and spending my day unhappy. Call me crazy.
Maybe I can help you too.
