On being a teacher

David Cohen, a California teacher, writes in Teacher Magazine that he was afraid to go to his 20th high school reunion.

The problem is, I am a high school teacher. Somehow, meeting my classmates at various events over the years, I found it hard to make my career sound as interesting or important as everything they had done...Over the years, in my occasional encounters with the class hot shots, I’d been subjected to stories of commercial and corporate ascendancy that left me feeling professionally inadequate…

Why should I subject myself to more career-one-upsmanship when I’m just a high school teacher? Whatever we teachers tell ourselves and others about the importance of our profession, it can be hard to steel ourselves repeatedly against the perceived cultural biases against teachers.

But he did attend, and was surprised to find that his classmates didn’t look down on him and were interested in his career, and that he no longer felt insecure about their career choices and successes.  He concludes:

Perhaps there’s a lesson here to be applied professionally. Maybe we teachers might move past our professional insecurity by interacting more with our community—socially, professionally, and politically—comfortable in the knowledge that our work and our perspectives do matter. We can put that knowledge to work for a greater good, asserting ourselves and acting upon the status we hold, rather than slowing ourselves down with worry, replaying the past in the vain hope we might fix it.

I’ve had a strange inversion of this experience.  One of the things that was hardest for me about leaving the classroom was no longer being able to say “I’m a teacher.” I loved having a career that people could understand, and I found, like Cohen, that people tended to be more supportive than I had expected.

Teaching was a state of being, not just a job.  I miss that about it.

I’m interested in the experiences of TEN members. How do you feel when you tell people you’re a teacher? If you have had another career, how does talking about being a teacher compare to talking about whatever you did before or after?

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Perhaps the author’s problem was in his own definition of himself as"just" a high school teacher. I spent 36 years as a middle school teacher. It never occurred to me not to be proud of what I did for a living.

In years of conversations outside the classroom, I don’t recall a single instance of anyone acting as though my occupation was somehow less important than their own. On the contrary, most people seemed to be amazed that anyone would purposely subject themselves to spending so much time with adolescents.

Perhaps the author is more concerned by his relative level of wealth. The fact that teachers are not particularly well paid is a measure of problems in how our society funds education. It is not a measure of the importance of what we do.

Although I haven’t worked in a pre-k-12 classrooms for over a decade, I still define myself as a teacher.  Teaching is at the core of my identity and the best profession in the world.  So, I agree with the statement that teaching is a state of being rather than a job.  I always felt proud to be a teacher and often wish I still were. 

As teachers, we have to get past being defined by others, our self-worth somehow tied to salaries or titles.  Consider that perhaps the rather wide-spread depreciation of the teacher’s position in the social order is an indication of the value we place on our children.  In other cultures it is still an honored profession.  What will it take to restore its luster in the U.S.?  And what difference would doing so make in our nation’s future?

Hi,
I spent 36 years as a middle school teacher. It never occurred to me not to be proud of what I did for a living.