When challenging situations – those that test you professionally, intellectually, and emotionally – become chronic, a strange phenomenon occurs where they seem both commonplace and insurmountable.
As an educator for over a decade, I became intimately familiar with all the obstacles that seemed to forever stand in the way of effective teaching, and the exhaustion that often accompanies that lingering, chronic adversity.
With time and distance comes insight; call it Monday-morning quarterbacking or indulging in hindsight bias, but one of the patterns I identified after a career change – and living a year outside the classroom – is just how draining it can be to try satisfying what feels like competing demands, or at best, walking the ever so fine line between them.
There is truly no way to explain what teachers do in a single day.
Every.
Day.
There is a pervasive narrative that “teachers are responsible for safeguarding our future,” and while this is certainly a worthy challenge, and the reason why so many teachers get out of bed and trek on each morning, it’s worth noting that this abstract idea of teaching – and teaching well – involves and asks so much of educators. And for those that embrace change and constant improvement, it’s easy to feel like every move towards progress or innovative teaching is at the expense of something else.
For instance, we ask teachers to:
Be creative, and yet teach to the standards.
Adapt lessons for all children to be successful in the classroom, while forcing students to take standardized tests even if they can’t read at grade level.
Be unafraid to discipline students and yet not be too hard on them.
Develop an emotional connection with students that facilitates trust and morale; which means, be friendly, but not too friendly. Get close to students, and yet … not too close.
Respect the scope and sequence of their curriculum and yet be as creative as possible by researching and pulling “engaging” learning activities into the course.
These nuances go beyond time management and workload concerns; they point to the heart of what it means to be a successful, innovative educator.
Teachers with high expectations of themselves often want to meet even greater goals – like adhering to a standardized grading process all while utilizing project-based learning techniques. They want to be relevant and exciting, while meeting traditional milestones. They want to show they can be tough…but not too tough….. It’s like walking on a tightrope….. without a net….. while people throw more things at you to carry.
If you’ve been an educator long enough, you know there are other expectations of teachers – protect children from bullying, identify possible family problems and even recognize signs of abuse, counsel students, get them up to speed on reading levels while being unable to separate children by ability…. set up their classrooms to facilitate learning, know where kids are in the building at all times, and make sure they get high scores on standardized tests.
And yet…. teachers rise to the challenge. Every day. The challenge of competing demands, the challenge of satisfying so many stakeholders, and the challenge of making one vitally important decision after the next.
A teacher makes almost 1,500 educational decisions a day. In a 6-hour school day, that means that teachers make more than 4 educational decisions per minute… and that does not include other decisions related to discipline, “instructional design, grading feedback, and revision of planned instruction.”
As the modern day classroom evolves with the changing tides brought in by technology, the focus is easily shifted away from these competing demands because, only more demands arise from such a revolution. But, even one of the greatest computer science minds of our times knows the truth isn’t always in the tech:
Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important. – Bill Gates
What can we do to acknowledge the value of our teachers and the stress of the competing demands they confront everyday? How can we support our teachers, the sculptors of the future?