My first question since my “What You’ve Always Wanted to Ask a Teacher” blog is, “What has been the biggest struggle of my career?” That’s an interesting question because I think I would answer this question differently throughout the years that I have been teaching.
When I first started teaching, I would say that most difficult part was preparing lessons that covered the curriculum that I needed to teach and pairing them with creative and relevant activities that my students could “sink their teeth into.” This is not so much of an issue for me now, over two decades later, as I have gathered huge bags full of “tricks” or tools that I can pull out and use.
In the middle part of my career, I’d say that the most difficult thing was adjusting to a change in society where, at least where I was teaching at the time, a larger group of parents stopped being allies to the teachers and became solely accusers. At the high school where I taught, I would often hear my coworkers lament such situations. When I first began teaching, most parents would come to the school and say, “What did my child do and how can we fix it?” Toward the 10th to 15th year of my career, I heard parents more often say, “What did you do to my child and how are you going to fix it?” I realized then, as I do now, that not every teacher is a good one, nor does he or she always make the right decisions or take the best course of action but I do know myself. I have always wanted to do what is in the best interest of my students and to work in conjunction with their parents. Have I always done the correct thing? Absolutely not, but the desire is within me. Because of some of the attitudes I have been confronted with, dealing with these types of situations have made my career difficult, at times.
Now, in my 3rd decade of teaching, what I find difficult in my career is to keep all the “balls in the air,” sort-of-speak. Teachers have so much more to do now than when I first started out. Not only do I have to create relevant, creative lessons that cover the curriculum, we teachers have local assessments to prepare for and give. We have intervention plans to make and follow. We have state tests for which we must get the students prepared. We have classrooms full of students with multiple needs with little help. We have less and less money to get supplies and materials. We compete with a digital society and try and run a classroom with students that are used to being electronically connected at all times, except – supposedly – in the classroom. We have extra-curricular activities that we are responsible for and stacks of papers and projects that are always in need of grading. My students are needier and less self-sufficient than they seemed to be when I first started teaching. All these things, and more, have made my career difficult.
In spite of all these things though, if I had it to do all over again, I would still choose to be a teacher. It is a joy to make connections with my students and to see their faces as they beg to continue reading in the novel we are covering in class. I love to hear what they are doing and when I am able to help a middle school kid successfully move over some of the lumps in life’s road, it is most satisfying. I love what I do even though there are difficulties.
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