I was having a conversation with my husband last week about what makes teaching so different a profession from others. Since the beginning of this quarter, I have had trouble separating not only my different classes but also my personal and, such as it is, professional life.
It seems like every class I take leads me to upholding the same strong principles of what my mission is as a teacher and how I view science education. It also seems like my personal life and musings are greatly impacted by what I am learning. I have worked very hard at keeping and maintaining the two spheres of my life as separate. I do not let personal problems get in too big a way of work problems and prior to this quarter, I have always been able to leave work and its emotions at work.
My husband defines himself not as a construction manager but as a left-leaning moderate, an environmentalist, a pragmatist, an explorer, a friend, a husband. His work is important to him, but it does not define him at home. My father is a pilot, a retired Air Force officer, but he defines himself as a thinker, a skeptic, a person of faith, a husband and father.
I feel like I cannot separate my private identity and definition of who I am from my role as a teacher. In everything I do, I aim to teach. Be it helping my husband cook or sharing gardening advice with a girlfriend or helping classmates understand how to use compasses and read topographic maps. I am always teaching. What is it about being a teacher that makes it such a crucial piece of my identity? I am a teacher, a wife, a caretaker, a thinker, a skeptic, an Obama-ite, a student, a person seeking faith, an adventurous soul, a lover of learning. I am not just a teacher, but it is a key descriptor of my identity.
From what I have heard from other educators, being a teacher remains part of your identity even after you have taught for decades. Will I ever be able to return to a clear distinction between my personal and professional spheres? I was so proud of that separation. I considered it a strength. And now it seems that I have lost that strength. I have not lost my identity, just the ability to clearly separate two different pieces of my life that, I think, are better separated. If I am struggling now, when I am just learning how to be a teacher, how debilitating will it be when I am actually teaching? Or is it a blessing I don't have the ability to recognize yet?
Can Messy Learning Make A Comeback?
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The “Test and Punish” era of education mainstreamed by the “No Child Left
Behind Act” of 2002 is ongoing, but because of initiatives like STEM
(Science, ...
11 months ago
Good question, if it's a blessing or a curse to be this immersed in these thoughts.
ReplyDeleteI've often envied The Architect with whom I share my life. When we walk through his buildings, there is real, tangible, touchable evidence of his professional success and he can walk through and keep rethinking his decisions so that he can keep learning from each project-- and he does so anonymously with no one personally associating him with his work.
As a teacher, people see *me* as the work. It's me interacting extensively with students, me that students respond to emotionally (even though their emotions are often not really about me), and often, it is my personal attributes that are mentioned when students fill out feedback forms at the end of class.
And that's partly why I'm pushing the class a bit to distinguish between good teaching as a personal quality ("enthusiastic, caring, etc) and teaching as professional skill (based on learning theories, on learned pedagogies, understanding of child development, and on kid data that we've analyzed).
To rely so much on our personal attributes is, I fear, a one-way train to burn out because it does come so much down to our sense of self-worth and effectiveness.
If we have no common language for talking about whether we're doing well (and how we know) and for grounding the 100s of decisions we make a day in the classroom, we're out there on our own and that's hugely stressful.
So. Chemists create new products, mathematicians create proofs, writers create writing, and teachers create long-term, sometimes invisible change in people in whom they invest a great deal of themselves.
How cool --- and how challenging to leave that at the end of the day.