One of the Many Reasons Why Teachers Burn Out

I teach 2nd grade. Well, some days it doesn't feel like teaching as much as it does corralling, but that's my title anyway. Teacher.

Not: Counselor, Social Worker, Mother, Psychologist, Behavior Specialist, Content Modifier, Miracle Worker, Self Esteem Booster or my favorite most recently added title, Obesity Preventor.

Anyone who knows a teacher or is a teacher herself knows that the public education system puts unrealistic, and frankly really annoying, expectations upon their troops of educators. In entering the education field I, unwittingly, thought that I was going to TEACH. Once I spent a few semesters on the front lines I realized my ignorance. If I had only known!

As it turns out you are expected to do a heck of a lot more than merely teach kids everything they need to know. Administrators just keep layering it on until you have to perform a juggling act so immense in its size and scope that you either drop all of your balls at once and go home feeling like a failure or you loose all your marbles over time trying to keep it all going.

I happen to enjoy having a functional, somewhat sane mind so I usually opt for going home feeling like a failure. I could write volumes on all those extra responsibilities that come along with being a teacher, but that is not really what this piece is about.

On a more grand scale this piece is about the slow but steady erasure of personal and parental responsibility in this nation. On a smaller scale it is about a meeting held at my school with all the teachers and our bosses. It was just a simple, "Oh, while you're at it..."

"While you're at it..."

("It" being: attempting and failing to close the "achievement gap," trying to get your students to read at just one or two years below grade level rather than the three or four levels behind they are at the beginning of each year, getting them to understand basic problem solving skills, attempting to provide them with some basic social skills so they can "behave" long enough to work on that whole academic thing, and a slue of other "its.")