Adapting to the Changes

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?

A fellow history teacher in the district where I teach, who also happens to be my older and wiser brother, Howard, said something that I connected with as I was writing this book:

The problem with the constancy of change for us teachers is that after a while it eventually just becomes noise. This is daunting on a million