Summary

Teachers who love teaching often leave the profession due to stress, lack of appreciation, and inadequate pay, while those who dislike it tend to stay, often for the power it provides.

Abstract

The article discusses the dichotomy between teachers who enjoy teaching but leave the profession due to its stressful nature, poor work-life balance, and inadequate compensation, and those who remain despite their dissatisfaction, often because teaching provides them with a sense of power. The author, drawing from personal experience, highlights the challenges faced by dedicated teachers who are unable to effectively empower their students due to administrative shortcomings and societal undervaluation of the profession. The article suggests that the education system risks losing passionate educators while retaining those who contribute to a negative educational environment.

Opinions

The author believes that teaching is a stressful and underappreciated profession, which is driving away talented educators.
The article implies that the current state of teaching in the United States is not conducive to job satisfaction or financial stability for educators.
It is suggested that teachers who are creative and dedicated to student empowerment are more likely to seek alternative careers when faced with the realities of the profession.
The author expresses that some teachers stay in

Why Teachers Who Love Teaching Leave, While Those Who Hate it Stay

Being a teacher is different depending on how you do it

Photo by Author: One of my many classrooms. We were not allowed to decorate any walls or anything, it wasn’t really an inspiring place to spend my time, but the students made it cheerful and fun.

The teacher’s lounge was a cheerless place with ratty furniture and a stained rug. The door was firmly closed and woe be it to any student who dared stick their head through that portal. On the first day of my student teaching, I was eager to make friends and hopefully get some inspiration from my new “mentors” so I decided to stop by this gathering place.

No one even looked up as I entered, and I stood awkwardly against one wall. Introductions were not made, so I just listened. Every teacher in there seemed to genuinely hate students, maybe they just hated what teaching had done to their lives, and since students were the only people they actually had any power over, they were easy targets. The students were difficult though and I could see why the resentment built up.

School administration seemed unwilling to do anything about behavior problems except tell the teachers to handle it. Their suggestions bordered on comical.

One week into my student teaching ordeal, one student stapled another in the hand. The administration told me I should have made a rule about stapling each other. These students were 17 years old, I don’t think the problem was that they didn’t know stapling each other was wrong.

Luckily I had been teaching in Japan for several years before enrolling in my master's program, so I knew that not all teaching was like that. I finished my student teaching requirements and got the hell out of there.

I stuck it out and have had a long and rewarding career as a teacher, but mostly not in the United States.

Lately, I have been seeing a lot of articles about how teachers are leaving the profession in record numbers and I am not surprised. It is a stressful, largely thankless job that doesn’t pay well and requires a huge number of unpaid hours.

No one in their right mind, who is looking for a nice, well-balanced, financially-secure life would choose teaching, and those brave souls who do, soon realize that they are so stressed out they can’t even do what they had hoped to do which was help people.

One surprising thing I have noticed though is that it is usually the teachers who love teaching, who are creative and good at their job, that are leaving. Those teachers who haunt the teachers’ lounge, hating students, they stay. Why is that?

There are several reasons. First, the really creative people figure out ways to continue doing what they love without so much stress.

One excellent teacher I know became a librarian. She is still able to help students and teachers but now she doesn’t have all of the lesson planning and grading to deal with, so she can enjoy her evenings and weekends. She is able to pursue her other interests and have a full social life.

Another excellent teacher I know transitioned into physical therapy. She had always loved sports and discovered that she could help people in that way instead.

Second, even though teaching is often not thought of as a high-status job, for many people, it gives them a little bit of power.

Not-great teachers get off on that power. They can pass, or fail a student, they can send them to the office and get them in trouble, and they can demean them in a myriad of ways.

I had a colleague once who would routinely make his students cry and then laugh about how weak they were. He would never quit teaching because he just loved the sense of authority this gave him. In what other job can you routinely make people cry and suffer no consequences?

Great teachers, on the other hand, do not do it for the power, they do it in order to empower students. When they find that they can’t do that effectively because of work conditions, they leave and find another way to contribute to society.

Other great teachers leave because they realize that while they are really helping other people’s kids, their own are paying the price. They are working every evening and weekend and can’t fully participate in their families lives.

Because they are dedicated to teaching, they don’t take shortcuts, they don’t grade papers while their students watch movies. They don’t hand out worksheets and sit at their desks while students fill them out, no, they create dynamic and interactive classrooms but that takes time and effort and all of that time and effort is outside of working hours so they are not getting paid for it.

If we don’t give teachers time and resources to do their jobs well, we will continue to lose the very best and retain the very worst.

Teaching can be easy if you don’t put any effort into it, but if you really do what it takes to be a great teacher, the result, more often than not, is burnout. Burnout can also turn into resentment as you watch your friends and siblings make double and triple (or more) the money you do with less education and shorter hours.

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