I thought hard. There were many candidates. I desperately love my books. My diplomas would be difficult to replace. I would certainly miss the bust of Socrates that I bought in Athens if it was lost to a fire. But nothing approaches the importance of one particular file in my classroom cabinet that gets larger as the years go on. It contains all the letters written to me by current and former students. I suspect most teachers keep similar files in their classrooms.
My students are my life’s work—my magnum opus. Since the task of a teacher is not creation but guidance and inspiration, these letters are the closest thing I will ever have to a painting, a symphony, or a sculpture. Whenever I’m having a bad day or going through a rough patch in my career, I open the file and read a letter written to me long ago. These letters and the sentiments they express remind me why I teach young minds.
These letters often act as flotation devices for my teacher morale, and I suspect they also serve this purpose for other teachers who hold on to these writings. We reach for these letters because teachers’ jobs are getting harder as we move through the 21st century. The endless cycle of change in education places considerable stress on classroom teachers’ everyday lives. The sources of change are numerous and diverse in content, and the changes seem to come in all forms and from all directions. They are often curricular, cultural, administrative, parental, and technological—just to name a few!
These changes affect every facet of our profession: the way we teach our classes, the way we communicate with parents and the broader public, the way we approach professional development and interact with colleagues and administrators, and so on. Unlike those who have professions that carry great stability and continuity of policy and expectation, teachers work in a professional space of perpetual disorientation. About the only constant is change itself—which is why this book will foster teachers’ resilience and morale in the face of this change.
In the book, we’ll explore how teachers can recognize and adapt to the changes that characterize the world of education, strengthen the relationships they’ve built within it, and actually thrive in their roles. Later in the introduction, I’ll also explain how the book’s unique structure can help readers home in on the concerns that are most relevant to them. This way, readers can—in a manner that suits how they learn and where they are in their careers—ensure that the classroom remains the chief place for transformative learning experiences and that they find hope and purpose at the center of it all.
Recognizing the Changes in Education
Unlike my school’s fire-alarm problem, which had a simple, direct solution, meeting our constantly changing job requirements as 21st century educators is more complicated and involved, and it will require us to first understand and acknowledge how circumstances for teachers have changed. Indeed, the seed of this text began with an article I wrote for the educational website the Educator’s Room; I titled it “10 Things Teachers DID NOT Have to Deal With 10 Years Ago” (Adams, 2018). As a writer, I dreamed of publishing content that goes viral, and I got my wish. The article exploded. Within a month, it had been viewed 114,000 times and shared almost 25,000 times. It was picked up and republished by the Washington Post’s popular education page Answer Sheet (Strauss, 2018). Clearly, the claim that the hurdles of educational success are getting higher struck a nerve in the corps of teachers.
Teachers who are in the middle of their careers know that the job is constantly changing and getting more difficult. Some perennial problems (poverty, lack of parental support, and threats to school safety) are getting worse, while some problems (pervasive student anxiety, strains associated with high-stakes testing, and the distraction of students’ ubiquitous cell-phone usage) have arisen with 21st century developments.
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?
Adapting to the Changes
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 different levels. But the worst part is teachers who can’t cut through the noise never flourish. They just get by. (H. Adams, personal communication, December 2018)
Teachers at all grade levels, no matter where they find themselves in their careers, must be able to confront the constancy of change in education so that they do more than merely “get by.” And my goal with this book is to assist them in doing so. I want to empower teachers to flourish. I want to impassion them to excel. The best teachers possess dexterous skills—some pedagogical and professional, some personal and intellectual—that allow them to successfully manage those changes that define the teaching profession. Thus, this book aims to help teachers adapt to the never-ending process of reform and change so that teaching remains both vital and meaningful to them.
As any veteran teacher can attest, there comes a moment in every teacher’s life when the newest wave of reform no longer appears as an opportunity to ride higher and cultivate fresh skill sets. Instead, new waves become menacing in their constancy, forces of nature that must be endured if one is to continue the odyssey of classroom instruction. From this perspective, it should surprise no one that anxiety and apprehension are fixtures in the lives of teachers.