After 20 years of teaching, I left the classroom in May. Students asked why. I told them the truth.
I’m tired. Really, deeply tired.
Other teachers are, too.
Nobody’s fully sure how many educators are leaving the profession these days. Some say there’s a shortage. Others say the headlines are overblown.
Regardless of the data, I am confident of this: Every single teacher I know is tired. I can’t find one teacher who says his or her job is easier or lighter than five years ago. Not one.
I teach — sorry, taught — at a private school, one so wealthy it has its own campus waterfall. Friends teach in inner city schools; their students sometimes go home to their water shut off. Others teach in middle-class public schools. Or the university. Or a magnet. Yes, the classrooms are different, but the story’s the same: Everybody’s exhausted.
It wasn’t always this way. Sure, we were all tired, but not like this.
I fell in love with teaching in my second year. The first? It was one long humiliation, failed lesson, and argument after another. The student in need of the most help? Me. I needed to learn one enormous lesson: Stop trying to control the students or the class. It won’t work.
So, I made it a priority to teach with more freedom and less ego. There’s a thing about freedom: It always leads to more. Something clicked and a little part of me yawned, woke up, and said: I can do this.
I learned to teach with joy.
I also learned to teach with less fear.
Fear, to borrow the epic Dune line, is the mind-killer. It is the antithesis of real education, which seeks to transform and awaken, not constrict and shock. Over time, as I combined more freedom with less fear, I began to see, quite clearly, that teaching is a love story.
Why?
Because love invites. Love cares. Love works against delusion. Love offers students a chance to step into larger versions of themselves. This is not maudlin, but magical. Love is a very real force — love of community, love of intellectual reasoning, love of robust discussion, love of community, love of transformation — that belongs in the center of the classroom, not checked at the door. The quickest way to establish whether or not your teacher is a good one? A single question: Does he or she love the work?
But it’s also why we are so tired. To teach well — really, really well — it takes an enormous amount of energy, devotion, and time. Teaching is performance art. I often found myself identifying not with other teachers, but with actors, lead guitarists, symphony conductors, tightrope walkers at the circus. That is what teaching feels like to me. A teacher orchestrates the ongoing transformation of hearts and minds.
You could also say our work is similar to a magician’s. To hold and capture the attention of 20, sometimes 30, modern American teenagers who are required to sit in your classroom for 45-, 60-, or 90-minute stretches. You do this through a variety of tricks: drama, emotion, stories, soft voices, even shouting. It is not disingenuous; it is full engagement.
Most people don’t understand how much energy this requires. All for $50,000 a year.
Consider what must be replenished each day in a teacher to satisfy the personal wellspring of energy needed to walk into a classroom, five days a week, and encounter 70, 80, 90, even 100 teenagers, meet them where they are, manage, entertain, discipline, instruct, cajole, uplift, question, thank, encourage, motivate, remind, renew, caution, question again, empower and enlighten.
Consider that especially when there are so many wolves outside the door.
Picture any American classroom. Every student who walks in carries with them an invisible suitcase of all their emotions, experiences, fears, hopes, dreams, stressors. Inside this suitcase is their psychology, their heart and mind, the spirit that animates them.
With each invisible suitcase comes off-gas, like a diffuser. When a student is troubled, the classroom shares in this trouble. When a student is calm, engaged, curious — the classroom, too. These are the byproducts of their inner world; they cannot check that at the door. Hide it? Ignore it? Sure. But it remains part of who they are and how their presence informs and influences in a classroom.
When a teacher walks into a classroom, he or she must be aware of and manage the atmosphere, the larger consciousness of the collective whole — in other words, all the suitcases at once. To borrow a yoga phrase, you hold the space. This is not hippie-dippie; think of your very favorite teacher. Did they not balance and constantly respond to the atmosphere in the room?
Did they not hold the space by shifting, redirecting, commanding, and elevating attention? Were they not constantly, sensitively aware of the space of your classroom, responding like a weathervane to slight changes in atmospheric pressure?
Teachers carry suitcases, too. Into our bags go the responsibilities of our daily work: meetings, grades, emails, parent conferences, more meetings. This varies from school to school. One teacher I know got a bladder infection. That’s in the suitcase, too. “I never had time to get to the bathroom,” she said.
Into our bags go all the personal parts of life: sick kids, aging parents, flat tires, credit card bills.
And at the bottom of our bags, the deep questions no one admits: Do they like me? Do they like this class? Am I boring? And my old favorite: Can I control the class?
There is another line of pressure: administrators, parents, elected officials. Meetings, grades and grading, paperwork, more meetings.
Now, consider the last five years. Into the diffuser goes the existential stress.
We carry so much fear. Armed teachers. A political civil war. January 6. News headlines that read The end is coming. Or: AI will eliminate humanity. Or: Nuclear threat rising. Critical race theory. George Floyd. There was the pandemic, the singular most difficult and disruptive event in the last 50 years of American education. There’s Ukraine. There’s Gaza. Climate change will kill the students, we’re told. Social media will kill them. During the day, school shootings. At night, drive-bys. It all goes into that backpack.
To so many of us, conducting the classroom symphony has simply become too much work. The bags are too heavy. How can we be relieved?
We’ve said this before, but it must be said again: Pay teachers what we’re worth.
I know there are complex and competing economic factors at play, and I’m not the one to address those. But we live in a country that put humans on the moon and invented the internet. We can figure this out. Culturally, education must be seen as noble, worthwhile, envious work.
Teachers should receive salaries commensurate with the job. It is standard practice for an executive to put in 70-hour workweeks: building a company, earning stock dividends and six, maybe seven, figures in return.
Yet, by comparison, any good, mature, responsible American teacher works as hard as his or her corporate equivalent.
In Tennessee, my home state, the starting teacher wages are under $50,000 a year. It is one thing to engage with the enormity of challenges while earning $100,000-plus a year. It is another altogether when you can’t afford to fix your radiator, take your family to the beach, or return your doctor’s call about that surgery.
We keep dancing around this subject, but it is always the first and last thought in solving whatever crisis arises in education. What if we pay teachers six figures a year?
I know there are complex and competing economic factors at play, and I’m not the one to address those. But we live in a country that put humans on the moon and invented the internet. We can figure this out. Culturally, education must be seen as noble, worthwhile, envious work.
At the school where I teach — here we go again, taught — I’ve crossed paths with over 1,000 kids. They are the cream of the crop, children of the elite. And out of 1,000, maybe four are considering careers in education. Business? Yes. Piloting? Yes. Finance? Yes. Real estate? Yes. But teaching? Anyone?
The burden, in loco parentis, has become too heavy. In the fog of American education, we need clarity. Better yet, we need everyone else to see clearly: What it is teachers do, what teachers are up against.
This is not the students’ fault. I love my students. They are a joy to teach and to know. But the classroom we all inhabit is hounded by mounting pressures and fears that do not remain outside the door. Teachers are leaving because these thieves keep getting past the guards, stealing away the best part of the classroom.
So how can we protect teachers? Protect the classroom experience? Pay teachers what they’re worth. Get the politics off our backs. Stop making rules, calling meetings, making speeches when you’ve never stepped foot into a classroom. Someone — administrators, parents, politicians — must step in and listen. Just listen to teachers. Stop trying to tell us what to do and not do.
Those who stay? Many are devoted, neck-deep in the most engaging spiritual labor of love, which is to say education as a ministry. Teachers walk into the classroom with the most noble of all human opportunities. Into those student suitcases, teachers can place joy. We can add calm. Wisdom. Courage. We can leak out a little fear and replace it with confidence, clarity, and a side of laughter. We can tell stories that ease the heart, uplift the spirit, expand the mind.
But first, our own suitcases must be manageable. Our burdens light.
Teaching is a love story. It should not end in heartbreak.