Читать книгу Riding the Wave - Jeremy S. Adams - Страница 10

Unlike my school’s fire-alarm problem, which had a simple, direct solution, meeting our constantly changing job requirements as 21st century educators is more complicated and involved, and it will require us to first understand and acknowledge how circumstances for teachers have changed. Indeed, the seed of this text began with an article I wrote for the educational website the Educator’s Room; I titled it “10 Things Teachers DID NOT Have to Deal With 10 Years Ago” (Adams, 2018). As a writer, I dreamed of publishing content that goes viral, and I got my wish. The article exploded. Within a month, it had been viewed 114,000 times and shared almost 25,000 times. It was picked up and republished by the Washington Post’s popular education page Answer Sheet (Strauss, 2018). Clearly, the claim that the hurdles of educational success are getting higher struck a nerve in the corps of teachers.

Teachers who are in the middle of their careers know that the job is constantly changing and getting more difficult. Some perennial problems (poverty, lack of parental support, and threats to school safety) are getting worse, while some problems (pervasive student anxiety, strains associated with high-stakes testing, and the distraction of students’ ubiquitous cell-phone usage) have arisen with 21st century developments.

Teachers are not imagining higher hurdles. A spate of ominous-sounding books like The Teacher Exodus: Reversing the Trend and Keeping Teachers in the Classrooms (Zarra, 2018) and Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How They Can Stay (Santoro, 2018) continue to emerge. Simultaneously, teachers’ websites gain traffic through posting provocatively titled pieces such as “The Exhaustion of the American Teacher” (Kuhn, 2013), “Why a Teacher Cannot Have a Normal Life …” (Trosclair, 2015), “Teacher Burnout or Demoralization? What’s the Difference and Why It Matters” (Walker, 2018), and “Why Teachers Are Walking Out” (Nichols, 2018). What is most disconcerting about these articles is that they are autobiographical in nature. These are not dry journalistic tomes of discouraging data harnessed to justify minor policy changes or pedagogic tweaks. Instead, the teachers writing these articles are trying to sound an alarm bell, or at least elicit some community concern, about the profound changes occurring within the teaching profession in just a short amount of time. Their pleas are deeply personal. Their wisdom is born out of struggle, not detachment. Together these writings speak to an underlying reality that teacher stress and strain cannot be a figment of teachers’ collective imaginations.

And yet many teachers enter the profession with positivity, optimism, and even idealism. Teachers at all grade levels and in all subject areas understand the classroom has a pulse of magical possibility in it; as teachers, we are imbued with the privilege of possibly making the ultimate difference in students’ lives. The words travel writer Horatio Clare (2017) uses to describe a new journey in his book Icebreaker: A Voyage Far North could just as easily be the words and sentiments of teachers at the dawn of every school year: “I experience one of those leaps of the heart, of love and thrill for the world, a euphoric gratitude for life … for which there can be no one word in any tongue” (p. 2). A potent appreciation for a lifetime spent shaping and influencing young minds is why teachers in the twilight of their careers often possess a quiet but palpable sense of contentment. They are rarely rich or famous, yet they know that their careers have been forces for good in the lives of many people. They have experienced too many “leaps of the heart” to feel otherwise. So how do teachers negotiate 21st century stressors and the ambitious, passionate spirit that drove them into the profession in the first place?