- I recently published a post with various answers to the question: How hard is teaching? Here is one response I received by e-mail from a veteran seventh-grade language arts teacher in Frederick, Maryland, who asked not to be identified because she fears retaliation at her school. In this piece she describes students who don’t want to work, parents who want their children to have high grades no matter what, mindless curriculum and school reformers who insist on trying to quantify things that can’t be measured.
Here is her e-mail:
There are so many ways to be a teacher though. This piece of writing talks solely about teaching in the American public school system, which is a different beast than teaching at a college or university, or even an international school, not to mention as a private tutor. I felt kind of shitty about throwing in the towel (though I may someday pick it up again) on EFL teaching, but I think a huge part of that was that EFL isn't what I want to teach. I became an EFL teacher to learn more about my own grasp of the English language so that I could learn to write better and so that I could live abroad and travel. I don't really care about EFL at all and I certainly think that had an impact on my longevity in the profession. Also, I think I learned that I don't want to be an academic; I want to be a practitioner, who may occasionally teach. For example, last year I gave a talk with another guest lecturer to an English 502 class at the local university about how to use writing skills outside of an academic environment and I loved it. Part of why I loved it, was that I was there to solely to teach, not to make sure that they learned or retained information, not to make sure that I was hitting any quotas or institutional goals. I get annoyed that in the US a "teacher" is one thing and one thing only in the mind of the public.