The Disease Which is Killing Teachers

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Every year, I have several—not a lot, but far too many—students who just don’t appear to care at all about their own success. When I was a young teacher, it used to infuriate me, but those were different times. Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about trauma and how it affects children. Now those students who don’t seem to care about their own success no longer anger me…they worry me, and they make me sad. They are the students who keep teachers up nights plotting ways to motivate them. It’s actually not that these students don’t care about their own success, it’s that the circumstances of their young lives are like blizzards that make it impossible for them to see the path to their success—as soon as you shovel out a pathway, it drifts over again. Again, these students are not the majority—far from it—but they tend to take up the majority of teachers’ time and emotional energy. It’s an American tradition that we tend to focus only on symptoms and ignore the disease. Indeed, this is why history tends to repeat itself. The disease is too overwhelming for society to think about. When it comes to public education, teachers are forced to stare down the disease every day and it takes a great toll. That’s the part of teaching that a lot of outsiders don’t understand.

Teachers tend to be empaths and we often take on a lot of the stress that our trauma-effected students bring into our classrooms. And let’s face it, under our system of high stakes standardized testing, part of that stress is due to the fact that those kids who don’t seem to care about their own success can negatively affect a teacher’s bottom line as our income and even our careers can be on the line. A teacher who finds themselves in a situation where they have an inordinate number of trauma-effected students who appear not to care about their own success might go year after year without a raise in pay because of the standardized test scores of these students. If that happens long enough, these teachers can be fired or, as so many are doing now, they might leave the profession by their own choice. So, teachers often toss and turn at night trying to figure a way to get our students to see the value of succeeding academically. This can be a monumental task given the completely random nature of the kinds of things which might motivate such students from one day to the next. In fact, what might work with a student one day may completely backfire the next. It’s a shell game that teachers find themselves in every single day and it can tend to drive one mad.

This year, I have one period each day where I have a small roster of students who have been selected because they have a history of falling behind in the completion of their assignments. It’s basically a structured study hall. These students have this extra period each day to catch up on the things they need to catch up on. The telling thing about these students is that most of the work they have fallen behind on are the types of assignments that were supposed to be done in class. Very little of it is homework. Some kids have legitimate reasons for being behind, such as extended absences, but most just fell behind because they don’t do their work in class when they are present. Even during the study hall time, many of them choose not to do those assignments and they fall deeper and deeper into an academic black hole. The question becomes, how do you help students who seem so unwilling to help themselves? In the old days, they fell through the cracks and were often sent packing to become “somebody else’s problem.” Those days are gone. Nowadays, every student represents a significant sum of money that a school system loses if they go somewhere else. Now, these students are the reasons why so many teachers are not getting raises, losing their jobs, or heading for greener pastures.

Mental health awareness and management has become a much bigger part of a teacher’s day to day job. Today, teachers are trained to look beyond the symptoms of “laziness” or “apathy” and understand that the underlying disease is often rooted in something much darker. Some students are able to use their trauma as motivation to make their lives better. Some students fold their trauma up into a bundle and bury it in the dark recesses of their souls as they desperately search their world for comfort in places that the adults in their lives don’t understand—and often fear. Some students are dragged into a pit of anxiety and depression by their trauma, and they shut down out of an involuntary reaction of self-preservation. Some students are caught in a loop of learned hopelessness.

Teachers often become the collateral damage of trauma they never experienced first-hand. Some teachers fall victim to the trauma they can’t even name as they battle other people’s ghosts. So, teachers attempt to become circus acts, frantically moving from one wobbly plate on a stick to another, trying to keep them all spinning. Some teachers have more plates to keep spinning than others. Some teachers are better at keeping plates spinning than others. Some teachers can handle it when a plate falls and shatters on the ground—they keep their eyes on the still spinning plates and carry on—while others become severely cut by the shards and fall bleeding by the wayside. Some teachers find the magic key to unlock the motivation of enough students to make them shine like stars. Some teachers snap under the enormous pressure and end up in viral videos captured by some student’s cell phone—they end up in the news media for losing it in a classroom—their lives instantly ruined. Most teachers just battle day after day, reveling in the brief glory of success here and there, knocked down by frequent setbacks, all the while struggling to keep their heads above the rising tide of the expectations and misconceptions of a society which increasingly vilifies them.

At the end of the day, for better or worse, teachers and students are in this together. Those of us who have chosen to stick it out continue to look for ways to navigate the choppy waters of an uncertain future all the while haunted by an unfortunate past.

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What I Learned in School Today with Shane Phipps