Dan, I have gone through a similar transformation as you have…after four years the challenges that were initially there for me are almost gone (classroom management now is automatic and prep is not all consuming as it was when I started). I am also with you, that the job has become more boring…the pleasures that I get in the job are now seeing the “click” when a student gets a difficult concept or when students achieve something that they didn’t think they could do. But there is something missing this year…and I think like you it is difficult to put your finger on.

From someone who is two years from retirement–for me the wonderful thing about teaching it gives you time to do other things. I have the best teaching job in the world–but I also love having the time to raise a family, have a 37 year marriage, read, spend time on computer, cook, go to gym, etc. I thanks God everyday that teaching was my career— and I didn’t have to work 12 hours a day, travel every week, work weekends, etc.

Dan:

You now know what I have gone through… it’s all 5-7 year cycles. I have gone from being the Head Varsity Football Coach at 25, to being the AP Government teacher, to the CCS Championship winning Softball coach, to the site technology coordinator, to writing grants to develop a new academic discipline, to the district technology coordinator to now becoming an administrator.

Why did I decide after being a teacher for 20 years to move into administration? For the challenge of changing the educational process on a larger scale. There is a lot of talk about being a big fish in a small pond, but with the technology in use today, there are no more small ponds. There maybe specialty places where those who share common interests like to gather and discuss, but they cannot isolate themselves any longer.

I could have at any point stopped moving forward and taken it easy and kept doing the same thing and been successful doing so, but what fun would that have been? Isn’t there a difference between teaching 30 years and teaching one year thirty times?

So, you can seek for the next challenge, or let it come to you. I was definitely in the camp of going to seek out the next challenge.

Maybe I have been fortunate to teach 3 or 4 preps a day, seldom having the same class twice except for marketing and now multimedia. I think I would go insane if I taught the same thing 5 times a day. i am never bored in my inner city school, there is always something happening and I am always scrambling to keep the technology up and running. I do get exhausted, however, especially when dealing with the issues of poverty.

Dan-

I can identify with the desire for a consistent challenge, but it seems to me as if you’ve placed the lesser challenge of classroom management above the greater challenge of teaching as much as possible to as many as possible.

I also feel that I’ve overcome many, though not all, of the initial hurdles (and it shocks and depresses me when I see colleagues with many more years of experience still floundering). But now I can concentrate more on the truly challenging task of teaching the segment of my student pop that may like me, but still feels science (and school in general)… meh.

When non-educators pontificate about outsiders coming in to whip schools in to shape, I think, “Well, hell… Come on in, but be prepared to stay awhile. It’s taken me 5 years just to reach the point of honestly being able to call myself a teacher.”

Great! You solved important problems with teaching! Now write up what you learned. This is your challenge! Help others! Here is an example of such writing, “Teaching and Helping Students Think and Do Better” on amazon.

Chris R.,

It’s not Dan that has placed classroom management challenges at their current inappropriately high place in the hierarchy of teaching challenges. It’s the nature of teacher preparation that has done this, with the vast majority of preparation institutions — both traditional and alt route — doing such a uniformly shitty job readying folks for the job. Compound this by a factor of 5,000 if you’re talking about people teaching in urban, rural, poor, or culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. Not only does this cause too many people to struggle too much too early in their careers, but it miscasts what is both hard and great about the work of teaching, as you yourself identified. It leaves people who “solve” the classroom management thing feeling like there’s little left.

And Dan, you wrote this yourself, when you explained that it wasn’t the lack of challenge, per se, but that you hadn’t found, identified, or set the new challenge. Now, I’m either the last person in the world who should get to write about this, or the first one, I don’t know, but this is huge, this thing about the new challenge. Because it can’t just be the accumulation of impact. It can’t be a numbers game, with x students taught, y lives impacted, z gains made. Dan’s in year 5 (?) so his enjoyment and satisfaction equals 5x + 5y + 5z. No, it can’t be that, doing it again and again and again putting less in getting more out and feeling worse about it.

As my sixth (and to date final) year of teaching drew to a close, I couldn’t do that math anymore, and I couldn’t identify the new challenge. Worse still maybe, no one else near and close to me could either. It has to be something more than improving my pie chart, getting 90% of the kids from FBB to B, rather than 85%. And it had to be something more than thekidsthekidsthekids, cuz that shit is a double-edged sword.

Then again, I sit at a desk on the 10th floor of a building, and sometimes catch a glimpse of the middle schoolers at P.E. down the street and a feel a sense of loss I don’t talk about at the weekly staff meetings.

I’m not be the person to be answering this, either, and this story doesn’t have a happy ending.

I stayed in the classroom for nine years. Like you, Dan, the “mechanics” of the job were mostly under control somewhere around year four. I did new challenges to keep me through the second half of the decade, though.

About the time that I was feeling comfortable with the basics of what I was doing (but long before I felt fully competent … a day which never arrived completely, btw), I found two new challenges.

The first was the National Writing Project: an association of teachers that challenged me to see myself as a professional within a larger group of professionals who were quite capable, thank you very much, of teaching each other how to become better at the job: specifically, better teachers of writing. I would guess that your blogging experiences, at least in part, served a similar function.

The second was that my school became a “magnet” school (sorta) for the fine arts. I was part of the team that worked on that transition and helped to design the humanities and creative writing programs. That took me from knowing how to manage and teach a mostly-successful English class to thinking about how to manage and teach two four-year programs (humanities and creative writing). That challenge kept me around for another five years.

When it became clear that the county wouldn’t actually be supporting that initiative (even though the county created it), and that all our work and success with students would remain unfunded, under-supported, and eventually die, I decided not to die with it and left the classroom.

Not sure if there’s anything to learn from all that or not. I’ll leave it to the wiser and/or more experienced to discern.

There’s a reason universities often require teachers to have 3 or more years of experience before they host student teachers and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards requires you to be in your fourth year, at least, before you can go through the process. You really get a handle on things by that time.

I get the feeling of not being challenged and looking for that next mountain to climb. Luckily, at the elementary level I’ve been able to change my role in my school to keep that energy. I’ve taught fourth and fifth and looped with my students and now I’m teaching first. It’s kept me on my toes and that’s been important to me. I felt like I was in a rut. You have to find what works for you.

If it’s challenge and failure you want, there’s always inner-city teaching. But I’m a 2nd-year teacher who’s still trying to do *anything* competently, so don’t go by me.