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I am a statistic. I decided to leave the teaching profession after five years in the classroom. Just like the statistics said that I would. I swore it wouldn’t happen to me. I have dreamed of being a teacher since I was five years old. In fact, my parents still love to tell the story of how I managed to make my older brother sit and play school with me. I would stand at my Care Bears chalkboard and draw squiggles and circles on the board because I couldn’t read or write yet, and by some miracle my brother sat and listened to my lesson. When he wasn’t around, or finally had enough, I would draw squiggles on blank sheets of paper and then sit at my desk and grade them. I wish I could look over my five-year-old shoulder and see what I deemed good enough for an A and poor enough for a D. I believed teaching was my destiny.
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As I grew up, I became aware of the inequities of our world and was passionately convinced that education was the answer. When I graduated with a Master of Arts in Teaching and a teaching license, I was ready to take on whatever was waiting for me. I knew the challenges that awaited me: students who were multiple grade levels behind with EBD, ADD, and ADHD learning in the same room with students who were Gifted and Talented, diversity issues, high stakes standardized tests, subpar school funding. I was undaunted. I had been told The Statistic in my graduate program about new teachers quitting after five years, but it was impossible to me that I could be one of them. I was passionate enough. I was enthusiastic enough. I believed in my students and the ability that each one possessed—if I could just connect with them and give them hope, they would succeed. I knew that no troubled students or long hours or demanding grading or low pay could ever deter me from my dream of being a teacher who made a difference in her students’ lives. And I was right. But what I never saw coming was the challenge I would have holding on to my faith in myself. I didn’t suddenly let go of it. I lost my grip—my grasp began slipping slowly, sometimes unnoticed, and always in spite of my desperate efforts to hang on.
At the beginning of my career I was a firm believer in the magic of being engaging. If I could find a way to engage students, interest them enough through authentic learning experiences, then they would become passionate about learning. In other words, it was all up to me. If I could just be a perfect teacher, my students would achieve the way I always dreamed they could. So I spent hours designing creative lesson plans that utilized technology, differentiated instruction to fit multiple levels, included an anticipatory set, summarized the learning throughout the lesson, incorporated movement to get their brain's stimulated, and ended with an activity to internalize the learning.
Once, I needed to introduce a unit on Anne Frank by providing background knowledge on World War II, so I invented a "Holocaust Museum" for the classroom. I printed off ID cards from the real Holocaust Museum of actual prisoners of the Holocaust and gave them to students as they walked into the classroom. The intention was that it would personalize the experience because they were to view each exhibit in the museum through the eyes of the person on their ID card. Each exhibit had visuals, personal testimonies, and objects to represent the theme of the exhibit. In the Labor Camps exhibit, I had the small amount of crusty bread and watered-down soup that was the ration of each prisoner for the day so students could have a concrete grasp of just how little they ate despite the hours of grueling labor they were forced to do. Each exhibit had an activity to help students think critically and connect the information to their lives. The physical activity of standing up and moving to the next exhibit would help blood flow that would stimulate the brain for learning and help extend their attention span.
I even had a presentation at the end of the hour that told each student the fate of his or her assigned prisoner. To visually drive the point home, students sat down if they discovered they had not survived the Holocaust. We then looked around at the remaining few students standing so we could see how many people we knew would have been killed during the Holocaust if it had occurred today.
“This is it,” I thought.
This lesson is engaging, and now I get to watch the passion come alive in my students. I get to see the impact this has on their understanding of the Holocaust. They will look at me and say, "Wow, Ms. Nielsen. I learned so much today. I'll never forget this lesson!"
But that didn't happen. Despite the long hours I put into designing a lesson that fit every criterion for what is considered good teaching, I lost that day to discussions of the latest drama that happened at lunchtime. Plans for the weekend. Who could poke the other in the arm the hardest. In other words, I failed. This was only in student teaching; I hadn't even started my official career yet. I didn't know it then, but the battle for belief in myself started that day and continued day in and day out over the next five years.
In the following years, I looked to my administration for reason to believe in myself. However, their criteria set me up to fall short because most of what I was evaluated on was out of my control. In order to get an exemplary score in engagement, every student had to be engaged for the entire hour. It is impossible for students to focus for more than ten minutes because of their stage of brain development. The brain actually needs space to shut down in order for learning to be internalized. A student looking out the window because his brain needs to shut down to process the information from the lesson may be viewed as evidence that I am not engaging enough as a teacher. I am marked down in evaluations. This does not factor in all of the other reasons a student may not be paying attention--none of which I have control over--like being hungry, worrying about family issues, working two jobs outside of school and not getting enough sleep. I accepted that I would simply never be good enough to please administration, and my belief in myself began to diminish.
I looked to society's opinion of teachers just in time to hear the battle over workers' rights and the subsequent criticism of teachers. I heard things like "It's basically a part-time job," and "If anything, teachers are over-paid and under-worked." The message I heard from politicians and organizations like the Gates Foundation was that I could and should such a good teacher that every student learns and grows in my classroom. In other words, if a student isn't learning, it's because I need to be better trained, more committed, more engaging. I am the problem. Even though research shows that no person can make another person learn, I accepted that I would never be good enough as a teacher in the eyes of society. My faith in myself diminished.
I looked to my students' performance on tests for evidence of good teaching, but I was most certainly a failure by that standard. Even if my students gained two years of growth, they came to me at least four years behind grade level, so two years meant they were still years behind. The growth isn't taken into account in test results. If a student entered my classroom for the first time in May, his or her test scores would hold me accountable for any lack of knowledge, even if the student wasn’t in my class at the time the lesson was given. When testing season arrived, there was always at least one student who enrolled in my school the week—even the morning—of the test without any knowledge of the English language, yet he would still have to take it in English. There was a moment soon after I passed out the test when he would look around the room and see the other students answering the questions without any visible concern. And I knew what was coming. His eyes inevitably met mine, and I saw fear mixed with helplessness and shame. For one brief moment we shared the same look of desperation: I saw him realize he would fail and he saw that I realized it too—and I could only silently will him to see that chains stronger than any steel held me in my chair. I would sit and try not to see as the resignation took over—see it start in his downcast eyes, his posture slump just a little more in his chair, his head eventually down on the desk so he could just pretend he fell asleep. And several months later I would be gathered in a staff meeting to go over our test results, and we would learn that we once again did not make enough progress in reading, and I would remember his look. According to the standardized tests, I would never qualify as a good teacher. My faith in myself diminished.
I looked to my students for affirmation that I was a good teacher. One student told me my class felt more like a family than just third hour English class. Another student from the same class told me I was a bad teacher. When he saw me in the hallway the following year, he continually told me how much he missed my class. Which assessment of my teaching should I believe?
My students generally measured a lesson not by how much they learned, but by if it could be considered fun. The advances in technology that were supposed to make engaging students easier backfired. Students are so used to having technology, it has become an expectation for every lesson. I'm competing against World of Warfare for what qualifies as engaging technology. There will always be students who don't like me and students who decide they cannot learn from my style of teaching, so if being a popular teacher to all students is the standard, I will never be considered a success. The only thing I wanted was to be a good teacher. The feedback told me I wasn't. And with that realization, my weak grasp on faith in myself slipped away. My dream crumpled, my faith disappeared, and I looked for a new job.
At first, I attributed it to burnout. I was still just as passionate and committed to teaching as I was five years ago. I must not be a good enough teacher to make it. The fuel I need to keep going comes from believing I am a good teacher, one who is making a difference and doing something worthwhile. In the days and months following my decision to leave the classroom, I continued to be haunted by my desire to teach. No matter how much I tried to put it behind me, I could not stop asking myself where I went wrong. But I accepted it, considered it final, and tried to heal.
Then I opened the Star Tribune and saw an article written by a student I had invested a lot of time in throughout the year, one who had given up on herself because she felt she was worthless. We used narrative writing in class to explore where these beliefs were coming from, and slowly she began to heal. I’ll never forget the day she came to class smiling—it was a truly beautiful moment. And now here she was writing eloquently about her beliefs regarding voting rights, and her voice was authoritative and confident—not the voice of a young woman who doubted herself. This article was proof of her comeback. I was proud of her, and I was grateful that I had pushed aside grading and lesson planning to listen to her. And then an admittedly cynical thought popped into my head. "Too bad they don't put that on a teacher evaluation." And then I stopped and thought more about that. What if I didn’t evaluate myself based on whether or not my students thought my lessons were fun? What if I didn’t evaluate myself based on standardized test scores? Or even riskier, what if I didn’t evaluate myself based solely on the opinion of my administrators?
I realized that if I stopped using these standards, I would see an entirely other set of criterion that cannot be quantified, measured, or assessed. No administrator was there when a student confessed he was thinking about suicide and came to me for help. No standardized test score can reflect my students’ admitting they held misconceptions and prejudice against the group of people we read about, but now they realized they were wrong. A book in my classroom changed my students’ perceptions. Amazing. It’s impossible to quantify the beauty of a student telling you he finally realizes that he doesn’t always need a teacher’s help, that he can do it on his own. There is no way an evaluation of my teaching during one class period could reflect the student who came to me struggling with cutting, who took the challenge to write a narrative about it and discovered that writing about it was therapy; that writing could be personally meaningful. I realized that every moment that mattered to me, every experience that made me feel worthwhile as a teacher, was unseen and often unknown to the people who make the decision on my value as a teacher. Each day of my teaching career held one of these unseen moments—unseen even by me. Had I realized it, I would have seen that they fueled a faith in myself I didn’t realize I had.
The truth is, even if the administration praised me on a daily basis, even if society as a whole held teachers in high esteem, and even if my students only said encouraging things, it wouldn’t matter. The moment I walked into the room and faced thirty students, I would still be paralyzed. The courage to challenge a student, an insight into what might be inhibiting a student’s learning, or the spilt-second-think-on-my-feet reaction of how to diffuse a fight between two students didn’t come from last week’s evaluation or last year’s standardized test results. I had faith in myself. I had already passed the greatest test as a teacher: I trusted myself.
So, I decided right there, with my student’s newspaper article in my hands, to start a personal rebellion. Not a rebellion where I stand in front of a school with a clever slogan on my sign, but a rebellion that exists only in my soul. I think it's time to be part of a new statistic: teachers who have lost faith in ourselves, but fight to get it back. Teachers who reenter the teaching profession still passionate, committed, and well-trained, but with an unwavering faith in ourselves based on the little victories that go unseen, the reasons we know we are good teachers.
With that in mind, I started looking for a new job. Teaching.
At the beginning of my career I was a firm believer in the magic of being engaging. If I could find a way to engage students, interest them enough through authentic learning experiences, then they would become passionate about learning. In other words, it was all up to me. If I could just be a perfect teacher, my students would achieve the way I always dreamed they could. So I spent hours designing creative lesson plans that utilized technology, differentiated instruction to fit multiple levels, included an anticipatory set, summarized the learning throughout the lesson, incorporated movement to get their brain's stimulated, and ended with an activity to internalize the learning.
Once, I needed to introduce a unit on Anne Frank by providing background knowledge on World War II, so I invented a "Holocaust Museum" for the classroom. I printed off ID cards from the real Holocaust Museum of actual prisoners of the Holocaust and gave them to students as they walked into the classroom. The intention was that it would personalize the experience because they were to view each exhibit in the museum through the eyes of the person on their ID card. Each exhibit had visuals, personal testimonies, and objects to represent the theme of the exhibit. In the Labor Camps exhibit, I had the small amount of crusty bread and watered-down soup that was the ration of each prisoner for the day so students could have a concrete grasp of just how little they ate despite the hours of grueling labor they were forced to do. Each exhibit had an activity to help students think critically and connect the information to their lives. The physical activity of standing up and moving to the next exhibit would help blood flow that would stimulate the brain for learning and help extend their attention span.
I even had a presentation at the end of the hour that told each student the fate of his or her assigned prisoner. To visually drive the point home, students sat down if they discovered they had not survived the Holocaust. We then looked around at the remaining few students standing so we could see how many people we knew would have been killed during the Holocaust if it had occurred today.
“This is it,” I thought.
This lesson is engaging, and now I get to watch the passion come alive in my students. I get to see the impact this has on their understanding of the Holocaust. They will look at me and say, "Wow, Ms. Nielsen. I learned so much today. I'll never forget this lesson!"
But that didn't happen. Despite the long hours I put into designing a lesson that fit every criterion for what is considered good teaching, I lost that day to discussions of the latest drama that happened at lunchtime. Plans for the weekend. Who could poke the other in the arm the hardest. In other words, I failed. This was only in student teaching; I hadn't even started my official career yet. I didn't know it then, but the battle for belief in myself started that day and continued day in and day out over the next five years.
In the following years, I looked to my administration for reason to believe in myself. However, their criteria set me up to fall short because most of what I was evaluated on was out of my control. In order to get an exemplary score in engagement, every student had to be engaged for the entire hour. It is impossible for students to focus for more than ten minutes because of their stage of brain development. The brain actually needs space to shut down in order for learning to be internalized. A student looking out the window because his brain needs to shut down to process the information from the lesson may be viewed as evidence that I am not engaging enough as a teacher. I am marked down in evaluations. This does not factor in all of the other reasons a student may not be paying attention--none of which I have control over--like being hungry, worrying about family issues, working two jobs outside of school and not getting enough sleep. I accepted that I would simply never be good enough to please administration, and my belief in myself began to diminish.
I looked to society's opinion of teachers just in time to hear the battle over workers' rights and the subsequent criticism of teachers. I heard things like "It's basically a part-time job," and "If anything, teachers are over-paid and under-worked." The message I heard from politicians and organizations like the Gates Foundation was that I could and should such a good teacher that every student learns and grows in my classroom. In other words, if a student isn't learning, it's because I need to be better trained, more committed, more engaging. I am the problem. Even though research shows that no person can make another person learn, I accepted that I would never be good enough as a teacher in the eyes of society. My faith in myself diminished.
I looked to my students' performance on tests for evidence of good teaching, but I was most certainly a failure by that standard. Even if my students gained two years of growth, they came to me at least four years behind grade level, so two years meant they were still years behind. The growth isn't taken into account in test results. If a student entered my classroom for the first time in May, his or her test scores would hold me accountable for any lack of knowledge, even if the student wasn’t in my class at the time the lesson was given. When testing season arrived, there was always at least one student who enrolled in my school the week—even the morning—of the test without any knowledge of the English language, yet he would still have to take it in English. There was a moment soon after I passed out the test when he would look around the room and see the other students answering the questions without any visible concern. And I knew what was coming. His eyes inevitably met mine, and I saw fear mixed with helplessness and shame. For one brief moment we shared the same look of desperation: I saw him realize he would fail and he saw that I realized it too—and I could only silently will him to see that chains stronger than any steel held me in my chair. I would sit and try not to see as the resignation took over—see it start in his downcast eyes, his posture slump just a little more in his chair, his head eventually down on the desk so he could just pretend he fell asleep. And several months later I would be gathered in a staff meeting to go over our test results, and we would learn that we once again did not make enough progress in reading, and I would remember his look. According to the standardized tests, I would never qualify as a good teacher. My faith in myself diminished.
I looked to my students for affirmation that I was a good teacher. One student told me my class felt more like a family than just third hour English class. Another student from the same class told me I was a bad teacher. When he saw me in the hallway the following year, he continually told me how much he missed my class. Which assessment of my teaching should I believe?
My students generally measured a lesson not by how much they learned, but by if it could be considered fun. The advances in technology that were supposed to make engaging students easier backfired. Students are so used to having technology, it has become an expectation for every lesson. I'm competing against World of Warfare for what qualifies as engaging technology. There will always be students who don't like me and students who decide they cannot learn from my style of teaching, so if being a popular teacher to all students is the standard, I will never be considered a success. The only thing I wanted was to be a good teacher. The feedback told me I wasn't. And with that realization, my weak grasp on faith in myself slipped away. My dream crumpled, my faith disappeared, and I looked for a new job.
At first, I attributed it to burnout. I was still just as passionate and committed to teaching as I was five years ago. I must not be a good enough teacher to make it. The fuel I need to keep going comes from believing I am a good teacher, one who is making a difference and doing something worthwhile. In the days and months following my decision to leave the classroom, I continued to be haunted by my desire to teach. No matter how much I tried to put it behind me, I could not stop asking myself where I went wrong. But I accepted it, considered it final, and tried to heal.
Then I opened the Star Tribune and saw an article written by a student I had invested a lot of time in throughout the year, one who had given up on herself because she felt she was worthless. We used narrative writing in class to explore where these beliefs were coming from, and slowly she began to heal. I’ll never forget the day she came to class smiling—it was a truly beautiful moment. And now here she was writing eloquently about her beliefs regarding voting rights, and her voice was authoritative and confident—not the voice of a young woman who doubted herself. This article was proof of her comeback. I was proud of her, and I was grateful that I had pushed aside grading and lesson planning to listen to her. And then an admittedly cynical thought popped into my head. "Too bad they don't put that on a teacher evaluation." And then I stopped and thought more about that. What if I didn’t evaluate myself based on whether or not my students thought my lessons were fun? What if I didn’t evaluate myself based on standardized test scores? Or even riskier, what if I didn’t evaluate myself based solely on the opinion of my administrators?
I realized that if I stopped using these standards, I would see an entirely other set of criterion that cannot be quantified, measured, or assessed. No administrator was there when a student confessed he was thinking about suicide and came to me for help. No standardized test score can reflect my students’ admitting they held misconceptions and prejudice against the group of people we read about, but now they realized they were wrong. A book in my classroom changed my students’ perceptions. Amazing. It’s impossible to quantify the beauty of a student telling you he finally realizes that he doesn’t always need a teacher’s help, that he can do it on his own. There is no way an evaluation of my teaching during one class period could reflect the student who came to me struggling with cutting, who took the challenge to write a narrative about it and discovered that writing about it was therapy; that writing could be personally meaningful. I realized that every moment that mattered to me, every experience that made me feel worthwhile as a teacher, was unseen and often unknown to the people who make the decision on my value as a teacher. Each day of my teaching career held one of these unseen moments—unseen even by me. Had I realized it, I would have seen that they fueled a faith in myself I didn’t realize I had.
The truth is, even if the administration praised me on a daily basis, even if society as a whole held teachers in high esteem, and even if my students only said encouraging things, it wouldn’t matter. The moment I walked into the room and faced thirty students, I would still be paralyzed. The courage to challenge a student, an insight into what might be inhibiting a student’s learning, or the spilt-second-think-on-my-feet reaction of how to diffuse a fight between two students didn’t come from last week’s evaluation or last year’s standardized test results. I had faith in myself. I had already passed the greatest test as a teacher: I trusted myself.
So, I decided right there, with my student’s newspaper article in my hands, to start a personal rebellion. Not a rebellion where I stand in front of a school with a clever slogan on my sign, but a rebellion that exists only in my soul. I think it's time to be part of a new statistic: teachers who have lost faith in ourselves, but fight to get it back. Teachers who reenter the teaching profession still passionate, committed, and well-trained, but with an unwavering faith in ourselves based on the little victories that go unseen, the reasons we know we are good teachers.
With that in mind, I started looking for a new job. Teaching.
