3: What Would Robin Williams Do?

The most easily recognized teachers in our culture are on the big screen. So when we think about good teaching, it’s almost impossible not to think of Robin William’s character in Dead Poets Society standing on a desk and inspiring his students. This might be part of the problem. When teaching is associated with unrealistic Hollywood characters, it can create impractical or ridiculous assumptions about what teachers do. In this episode, we hear how the stereotypes of teachers may be contributing to teachers’ decisions to leave education.

Music:

Theme Song By Julian Saporiti

“NPC Theme” by HoliznaCC0 is in the Public Domain.

“Sunny Afternoon” by HoliznaCC0 is in the Public Domain. 

“Infrastructure” by Scott Holmes Music is licensed under a  CC BY-NC license.

“Just a Blip” by Andy G. Cohen is licensed under a CC  BY license.

“Room With a View” by Jahzzar is licensed under a CC BY-SA license.

Movie Clips:

Freedom Writers (Paramount Pictures)

Dead Poets Society (Touchstone Pictures, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)

School of Rock (Paramount Pictures)

Ferris Bueller (Paramount Pictures, United International Pictures)

Transcript: 

Episode 3: “What Would Robin Williams Do?”

There is a picture-day-esqu photo on my parents’ fridge of me sitting on my dad’s lap. I am wearing a tie-dye shirt and my orange hair is in its natural state of an Eddie Munster widows peak. My dad is in a blue button down and has on a tie. My cheeks crowd my eyes, my smile is so big. My dad, who doesn’t always smile for pictures, has a cheeky grin. 

 

This picture was taken around the same time that my dad squatted down to eye-level with me and said: “When people ask you where you got your red hair, you tell them the milkman. Okay?”

 

He didn’t make a big deal about telling me this. It was just a directive, and I said okay. I figured, yeah, that makes sense. 

 

So as adults would come by, ruffle my hair and say things like, “Oh my, what pretty red hair. Where did you get hair like that?”

 

I’d look up at them, smile, and tell them, “The Milkman.” 

 

They would guffaw, cough down a drink, blush, and I’d try to explain, “You know, because he delivers things.” 

 

And they’d laugh out an “I’m sure he does!” and find my dad who would have a grin settled between his bouncing shoulders as he muffled a laugh, and my mom would say something like “G-uh, Darcy Joe”

 

Not to be heavy handed, but the stereotypes of what a milkman may or may not do when visiting people’s homes is what makes the joke land. This joke was lost on me until high school. I didn’t understand the baggage associated with being a milkman.

 

Language matters. Words like milkman have connotations - they carry weight or have stereotypes attached to them. That’s why I can’t flip someone off and say, “Why are you upset,this means joy to me.” There are too many representations of middle-fingers that situate the digit as a symbol of the obscene. Repetition and representation give meaning. 

 

The middle finger or terms like milkman or teacher, carry a history of expectations and stereotypes. Last episode we heard about the historical inheritance of teachers, which is significant in how we view modern teachers. But history isn’t the only thing that impacts how we view teachers. Today, we’re going to look at the teacher stereotypes in pop-culture and how these stereotypes can be contributing to teacher attrition.

This is Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore, a 7-part podcast series exploring why teachers are leaving education and what can be done to stop the exodus. I’m Charles Fournier.

Here is part 3: “What Would Robin Williams Do?”

Molly Waterworth: I've gotten to the point where I see any TV show or movie where some sort of plot device hinges on the inspirational teacher. And I just roll my eyes.

 

This is Molly Waterworth. We heard from her last episode, and she just left education after teaching English for 8 years. She points out a stereotype of inspiring teachers in media:

Molly Waterworth:I just can't.  I can't stomach it because it's so saccharin. It completely obscures the fact that these inspiring teachers that are either drawn from real life or the product of someone or someone's imagination, it completely obscures the fact that their inspirational teaching is very likely the outgrowth of massive mental health deficiencies. And like a complete imbalance of where they spend their time and where they're getting like their soul fed. Inspiring teacher stories make me feel awful. 

 

That shouldn’t be the case, right? Inspirational teacher movies should INSPIRE. And they can and they do - they inspired me - but what Molly points to is a nagging reality in many inspirational teacher stories. 

 

Dead Poets Society Clip

 

As you can hear in this scene from Dead Poets Society, Mr Keeting, played by Robin Williams, pushes his student, Todd Anderson.. And in this unconventional way Mr. Keeting helps Todd start to gain some confidence and see his potential. Similar scenes occur in other famous teacher movies, like Mr Holland’s Opus, or Freedom Writers. 

 

These movies project a fantasy of heroism onto education, and people love it. Inspirational teacher movies are usually underdog stories: A  teacher rails against convention and inspires and does amazing things for others no matter the personal cost. We are attracted to this as a culture. We want heroes that are selfless. We want to see ourselves as capable of being like Robin Williams’ character in Dead Poets Society. 

And the way these movie teachers influence kids…man, that’s the dream.  But, several if not most of the teachers in those stories that inspire don’t have the healthiest work-life balance. They give everything to their students - time, energy, love, inspiration. And these movie teachers inspire in the public comments like, “We need more teachers like this” or “I wish teachers would be more like (whatever movie teacher).” But we need to ask, what is expecting teachers to fit a stereotype asking of real teachers?

 

Think of Freedom Writers, a movie based on the real-life Erin Gruwell, who is played by Hillary Swank. She is the epitome of the inspirational teacher stereotype. Halfway through the movie, her husband leaves her because she is spending so much time focused on her students, 

Freedom Writers Clip 

The film creates a feeling that the husband might be unrealistic. As an audience, we’re rooting for Erin Gruwell because she does amazing things - her husband points this out. And don’t get me wrong, Ms.Gruwell is phenomenal and her story is amazing, but there might be danger in presenting this story as a precedent for what good teaching looks like. Yes, she is a good teacher, but at what cost? In most other films about different careers, it’s likely the main character would realize that work is taking too much and family is more important, but not in inspirational teacher movies. Expecting teachers to do what Gruwell does is expecting teachers to forfeit their own lives for students. It’s expecting martyrdom. This is a stereotype.

 

And the reality is different.

Molly Waterworth: We're not martyrs, and we're not perfect. And there are things that can be said about the profession as a whole and certainly about individual teachers that needs improvement, absolutely. But I think a lot of it maybe stems from just this sense that teachers aren't entirely human - that we are saints. And so therefore, we shouldn't worry about all of these factors that are making our jobs harder, because we have this big calling on our lives that turn us somehow into people that don't have needs.

This language that surrounds teaching is significant. It feeds the stereotype of selflessness, which in turn has an impact on how teachers are treated. Right now teachers are feeling burned out because this stereotype is unrealistic - it’s creating an expectation that makes teachers want to leave education. 

I met up with Rachael Esh at Welcome Market Hall in Sheridan, Wyoming on the eve of her very last day as a teacher.

Rachael Esh:  It's a bit of a stereotype with teachers. It’s like, Oh, this has been your calling since you were this age, or since this teacher impacted you.

This idea of a calling is that you don’t teach for the money, you do it for the kids because it is what you were meant to do. It is your destiny or purpose. A quote unquote “calling” can create a sense of guilt in teachers when they realize, crap, I’m not getting paid enough for this, which is in contrast to the narrative surrounding  teaching like Molly points out:

Molly Waterworth: People don't get into this for the money, why would they? But they're in it for the kids, and they're in it for that sense of purpose and mission. That's like, “Yeah, but I also would like to be paid.”

So to have a calling is to feel like teaching is more than a job, more than a paycheck, it is a clear directive from some higher power for the direction your life should take in service of others. Rachael didn’t feel like that stereotype matched her experience.

Rachael Esh: And I don't feel like that's usually the case. It's more of a roundabout zigzag pattern.

This surprised me. I grew up wanting to be a teacher because, as Rachael said, I had some amazing teachers leave an impact on me, but I never thought teaching was my calling. It was something that sounded cool, and it was made cooler by movies like Dead Poets Society. I wrote the movie’s motto, “Carpe Diem” on all of my notebooks. And I liked reading and writing and teaching people, and teaching would give me a chance to coach. Not once did I get the sky part and shine a light on my career path. It wasn’t a calling, and of the 30 teachers that I interviewed, hardly any of them felt like teaching was their calling either.

For Rachael and Molly, they had different plans with where their lives were going to go.

Rachael Esh: So my undergrad I actually got at Ohio University in environmental biology, and so I thought I was gonna maybe do field work or something like that.

Molly Waterworth: I declared my major as geography, but I did it with the intent of being able to go into the forest service. But I found out pretty quickly that I really didn't care about any of my classes. And I found out that I was going to have to take calculus and I wasn't interested in doing that. So I kind of bounced around into various humanities areas.

And both Rachael and Molly landed in education because they each had a summer experience in college that put them in front of kids. Rachael took an internship teaching environmental education and Molly went to China with a group from college and got to help kids with their conversational English. They both found their way to being educators because of positive experiences teaching kids.

Rachael Esh: So I knew I either wanted to go on to park service or education after working with kids then. And so it kind of just worked out that getting my degree in education was just more accessible, and I kind of wanted to separate my fun time, which was like outdoors, from my work. So I decided to kind of go into education. And I mean, the kids are never boring. So you're like, well, heck this. This beats an office job any day of the week.

And when Molly returned from China, she declared first as an elementary teacher. 

Molly Waterworth: I think that when I envision myself being a teacher, I thought of myself reading with kids, and talking about literature and talking about books and big ideas and stuff like that. And so at that point, I had the very obvious revelation that I should be a secondary English teacher because that would afford me that opportunity most often. So that was kind of my meandering path into into

There was no bright light for either of these teachers, no calling. Nothing so profound. Like most people, they stumbled onto their desire to do a job because they took advantage of an opportunity and realized, “Hey, this isn’t bad.”

And Teaching wasn’t a last option for either of them. They weren’t failing at other things in life, which is tied to another stereotype of teaching. If teachers aren’t depicted as martyrs, they’re often seen as selfish or deviant or lazy or dumb or boring, like in Ferris Bueler’s Day Off.

Ferris Bueller Clip

And this image of teachers perpetuates the idea that teaching is a last ditch option for people that can’t do anything else. This stereotype often leads to a willingness to discredit teachers as experts in their field. Not being seen as experts in their field is a major reason teachers gave for leaving teaching. 

For Molly or Rachael, they became teachers by choice. They didn’t need to fall back to something easier. It wasn’t a School of Rock scenario, where Jack Black’s character, Dewey Finn, hits rock bottom before becoming a long term sub proving that someone with no qualifications can be a better teacher than trained and dedicated teachers - a trope that we see over and over again. 

In the film, Jack Black’s character even draws attention to a common saying that is tied to education. 

School of Rock Clip

Dylan Bear is a PE teacher in Pinedale, WY. We sat at a picnic table in front of his house with a view of the Wind River Mountain Range, while we drank coffee, snacked on a loaf of banana bread he was gifted from a student, and talked about these sayings and images surrounding education. 

Dylan Bear: I think another thing, we've gotten a lot of quotes, like funny quotes in the society, like, oh, teachers, they take these jobs for June, July and August. I think that's something that needs to stop. 

What Dylan has noticed is the negative lens with which culture and Hollywood has viewed teachers. Like I mentioned earlier, we stereotype teachers as good or bad, the marty/savior type that saw teaching as a calling or the boring/lazy person who saw teaching as a backup plan. 

But, Dylan, like Molly and Rachael, didn’t see teaching as a calling. He didn’t see teaching as a fall back career either.

Dylan Bear: So I started off as an engineer, and those were just not my people. And I was looking more for a little more social environment, a little more high energy versus analytical, consistently, day in and day out. And so I went from engineering to math in secondary math education because I liked working with kids. And then after a few years of that three years deep, looking at all the papers all the time, I just couldn't do it, so I switched from math. I was actually sitting in Prexy's Pasture and Laramie. And the special ed teacher came and sat down next to me and she said, What are you thinking about? Instead, there was my longboard. I said, I don't know if I can do math the rest of my life. Would you rather be teaching math or out playing a field, you know, and I thought like instantly.

Dylan would rather be out in a field. Teaching was a good path for Dylan - not a calling and not a last ditch option. He takes his job seriously, and he is someone that plans on teaching for some time. And when Dylan started feeling a little burned out, he moved towns and got a change of scenery, so that he could keep teaching. He isn’t naive to the reality of burning out or how difficult the job is, nor is he jaded in thinking that anyone could do this job.

The key word here is reality. The reality of a teacher is that teachers are human, not a stereotype. We make mistakes and we have successes and we make some profound impacts on kids and we make some mediocre impacts on kids. 

Dylan Bear: Some teachers are really good, and some are really lazy. And some kids are really good, and some are really lazy. So it's like, we don't want to paint a broad brush over everybody. And I think sometimes we do an education because there's so many people in education. It's like one of the leading job forces out there. So you hear these stories that are negative about one or two teachers, and then you say all I'm doing the same with kids. I hate when people say, kids are always on their phone. It's like, no, no, some kids are on their phones. Some of them are waiting for you to talk and give them a good lesson. I think education gets those broad brushes which devalue people. And that's a dangerous world. 

Dylan recognizes the need for grace and the danger of broad generalizations of any groups. He recognizes the fact that people are human, but sometimes we only get a snapshot of education, which creates these generalizations that feed into the stereotype of teachers as either good or bad. Dylan experienced this first hand when he had a student continuously refuse to take off his hat. 

Dylan Bear: I was like, This is absurd. So I'm a climber, and so he was playing badminton, and I popped his hat off and ran up and jumped up the basketball hoop and climbed in the rafters and hung it from like, the highest point in the gym, like, 50 foot up. And yeah, not very smart, but it was like, I didn't think about it, but kids Snapchatted it. And all the kids came like, “Oh, we saw you but it was out that was so funny. That it's like you have to be aware of that.” 

The snapchat of Dylan only includes his climb. It doesn’t include the warnings he gave the student from that day and previous days. It doesn’t include Dylan’s positive relationship with the student and the students’ family, or all of the normal/positive interactions Dylan has with his other students, or the mundane aspects of his job that he does everyday. The Snapchat lacks context, and this is how stereotypes begin and are fed. A single image becomes the representation of the whole - even if it is a fragment of the reality.  

This is the kind of thing that becomes an overgeneralization - a stereotype of teachers. These stereotypes are on social media and in movies and they contribute to cultural narratives about education that are unrealistic. Some of these glimpses and snapshots might be part of what teachers expected education to be, which is misleading and could be contributing to the disillusionment leading to teachers quitting. Here’s Molly again.

Molly Waterworth:  I think that the image probably came from a couple of places, a selective memory of my high school and middle school classrooms. So thinking back to those good experiences that I had as a student, I was like, “Okay, I want to create that for other people.” But I also had it in my head, the the image of the cool, thoughtful, worldly literary teacher that you see in like Dead Poets Society or any number of  other movies like that - opening up doors and exploring identity and figuring out who we are all along the way. 

Dead Poets Society Clip

I love Dead Poets Society, and Freedom Writers, but I remember telling my wife, after our first week in real teaching jobs: “This sure as hell isn’t Dead Poets Society.” I had been fooled with what teaching would actually be, and this is also an image of what the public seems to see of educators. They want the engaging classroom, the teacher that inspires, and don’t we all. Or they expect the lazy, boring, slacker who got into teaching because their real goals didn’t pan out. But education is more complex than a movie. 

Molly Waterworth:  The crushing reality of grading was something that I hadn't quite prepared myself for. I think that I knew going into teaching, because obviously, you know, that you're going to have to grade and that's part of the job. So the grading part was overwhelming. You never see in movies, like staff meetings, or having to figure out the copier or the deeply existentially difficult process of figuring out the culture of the building in your first year. Just the kind of mundane but deeply tangible on a daily basis struggle of making sure that everything fits in your lesson plan. Like that's not glamorous. But it's, it's the part that makes or breaks you as a teacher of just balancing the day to day and making sure that you're hitting your standards and teaching the stuff that you don't care about, but you have to do anyway. Like, Robin Williams isn't gonna do that.

I would love to have a b-roll version of Dead Poets Society where Robin WIlliams’ character, John Keating, sits for 4 hours grading papers, intermittently standing up to stretch, get a coffee, shake his head and mumble things like, “I swear we went over that.”

Molly Waterworth: You never see an inspiring teacher movie where they are tracking missing assignments. You never see them answering the onslaught of emails at the end of the semester, asking how to get my grade up. You never see that. You see the inspiring parts and that's it. Never the work that it takes to get there.

So we see teachers that either act as martyrs like Keating who, don’t forget, gets fired at the end of the film after a student kills himself, or we see teachers that make real teachers cringe.

Molly Waterworth:  I remember watching Glee when that was out.  And it was not just unrealistic, but it was just so I thought it was insulting the way that the teachers were showing their like, as just unserious. Too involved in teenagers' lives. And, like, really, really concerned about both of those things. That I was just I couldn't do it. I couldn't put up with it. 

And again, why does this matter? Why does it matter that depictions of teachers are unrealistic? It honestly wouldn’t matter if these depictions didn’t seep into how teachers are currently being treated. If the cultural view of education remained realistic. But this is how stereotypes work. We may recognize a stereotype as wrong or dangerous, but they can still seep into our behavior. 

And they influence what parents expect from teachers, what students expect from teachers, and even what teachers expect from themselves. If teachers buy into the stereotypes, they may be striving for a sense of perfection and martyrdom that is unhealthy and unrealistic. So it’s up to us, all of us, to push against these stereotypes. Like any other cultural stereotype, we need a massive cultural shift in how we think about teachers, which often starts with how we represent and talk about teachers. 

Unless we become conscious of our biases or of these stereotypes, things won’t change, and in the context of teaching, teachers will continue to quit. 

The misconceptions surrounding teachers and education are very much influenced by what folks see on a consistent basis. This isn’t to say that there haven’t been realistic depictions of teachers. I love Tina Fey’s character in Mean Girls. She was quirky and smart and imperfect. Her character felt more real to me, but this is an outlier in teacher representations. 

Stephanie Reese: Culturally, I think the media shows teachers as “Man, they just work tirelessly.”

You might recognize Stephanie’s voice from last episode. I met up with her at Blacktooth Brewery in Cheyenne, she’s the general manager there. Stephanie taught PE from kindergarten to college, and she left education after 8 years.

She points out how some of the perceptions of education bleed into the expectations placed on teachers. 

Stephanie Reese: They just love what they do so much. They love kids. They're willing to put in all these extra hours, because they just love what they do. And they're okay with that. And, and that doesn't actually give teachers a voice. And that, to me is bullshit because teachers are tired, they're exhausted, they're stressed to the max there. Some may love it. And fine. If you have that intrinsic motivation to love something without getting anything back. That's amazing. You are a superhero. 

When being a teacher is associated with loving kids as Stephanie points out, does that mean that leaving education means a loss of love for the kids? Or that not wanting to put in the extra hours is because teachers don’t love the kids? This rhetoric is dangerous and it isn’t helpful when thinking about why teachers are leaving. When teachers decide to leave education, they often hear, “You can’t, you’re so good for the kids” or something to that effect. This is said in praise, but it actually ignores what teachers are dealing with and it pushes this cultural stereotype that teachers ought to be willing to give everything for the kids. The reality is, the list of what teachers do, the extra work teachers have, is tremendous and all of that work rarely makes it into films.

Here’s Dylan.

Dylan Bear: It’s funny when you asked me to do this, I looked up, like, what are the job requirements for teachers and there was like, on the, on the description, it was, like 30 bullet points. It was incredible, like, lift 50 pounds, walk 100 yards. When Does anyone do that? We think teachers are just this, like square. But it's not, it's this open ended job that you can work your tail off forever, you know, or you can do the minimum and you still get paid the same. So it's like, I think a lot of people want to know, like, here's your job, and here's what you're gonna get for it. And that's not the case in teaching. 

And that list of job requirements is long and ambiguous and continuously added to. A big portion of what it means to be a teacher isn’t simply “to teach” or “to inspire.” It’s to manage a huge amount of expectations, which doesn’t often get included into the stereotype of teachers, and if it does, it’s only for a moment.  Stephanie had strong thoughts about what teachers are expected to do. 

Stephanie Reese: This isn't going to be a positive one, Charles, I hope that you're not like, brace yourself, right? I'm not gonna sit here and say, oh, yeah, teachers are here to inspire teachers are here to you know, try to spark some sort of love or interest in something and help every single kid and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like all that sugar coated shit. Fine. That might be the case. But to me, and I know a lot of teachers who agree, it's babysitting. So our roles are just sit tight, do your best, try to get in something that's worth value. Or maybe try to teach his kids to be decent human beings.   

The stereotype often clashes with the reality of teaching. Still many teachers try to live up to the inspiring teacher stereotype, which can be contributing to the sense of burnout lots of teachers are experiencing. 

Many teachers, whether they intended to or not, have wrapped their identity around education, which is kind of a cultural expectation - they are one with the school. This can make being in public and trying to have a personal life kind of awkward especially in small towns. 

Rachael Esh:Anywhere we would go. I'd be like, I can't go there. All my kids are gonna be there, you know? Or like, do you want to go bowling? No, I don't want to go bowling. So I have to talk to seven of my students online, like no, like, you know, so there's just places that I don't even want to go because I just get bombarded with children. Which is, I love them. But you know, you want to like, be away from work for a while and you're like, I've done this all day. I want adult time. It's adult time now. they'll walk by when I'm having a beer. I'm like, don't, don't you look at me. 

The teacher advocating for healthy boundaries or focusing on mental health in a genuine way is not a common teacher stereotype in pop-culture. This has only started bubbling up more recently on social media with teachers and former teachers drawing attention to their struggles in the classroom. There have even been some new television shows that have started to address what teachers are struggling with. They are pushing against the stereotypes. This kind of representation can help restructure how we think about and discuss teachers. 

Seeing teachers as stereotypes either creates standards so high it is absolutely unrealistic or we are creating a villain to be a scape-goat for all of our worldly problems. Both of these images are contributing to teachers leaving the profession, and both of these images are very common cultural tropes. To break free from stereotypes, we need to first recognize they are there and how they are working. 

I teach about stereotypes when I teach rhetoric. One of my favorite lessons to teach is about binary opposition. We get to address stereotypes and how we, as humans, often categorize ideas and language into this or that, and how such categorization is often a logical fallacy.  Here’s a quick look at how the lesson goes. 

I start by asking students what a binary star system is, then draw it on the board. Binary stars are two stars that orbit each other. They rely on each other for survival. If one dies, the other dies. In this binary, one star is larger than the other, it carries more weight. Even so, if the other star dies, the larger star will also die. 

How we categorize language and ideas is similar. Things are good or bad, and we often privilege one side of that opposition. And we wouldn’t know good without bad. The poet Wallace Stevens wrote, “Death is the mother of Beauty,” which means, without death, we wouldn’t know beauty. 

At this point, a few of the students are nodding, others are usually staring, but as I move around the room, their eyes all follow me. This is when you know that you’ve got ‘em.

Now, I move to the board again and ask the students to picture the perfect and stereotypical 1950s couple. I give a few seconds - they don’t need long. Then I ask, “So, who are they?” Right away, students establish a white, able-bodied couple, made up of a man and woman. This is when I turn my back, marker ready, and say, “Okay, tell me about the woman.” They yell over each other rattling off the same image of a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman with a light color poodle skirt, wearing minimal makeup. She cooks, cleans, and takes care of children. Her only vices are gossip and the occasional cigarette. I then have the students describe the man. He’s tall, has dark hair, wears a dark suit, and works in an office. His vices include drinking, smoking, fighting, and adultery. 

In less than two minutes, my students always describe Don and Betty Draper perfectly. Then we continue with other opposing stereotypes under men and women. We agree that these are stereotypes as a class, but I point out that they came up with these opposing lists in about 5 minutes total. It takes that long because I can’t write as fast as they yell out ideas. I tell them, even if they don’t believe in these stereotypes, they are ingrained in their brains because of the culture in which we live, and if they’re not careful, they might unconsciously let them dictate their behavior

At this point, I pause the class and take a different colored marker and circled  qualities on both sides of the list. Then I tell the students, these are things that make up who I am. I have a lot of qualities under both men and women circled: I cry more than my wife, I am emotional, I like to cook, I’m terrible with vehicle maintenance, but I am also a woodworker, I was an industrial ironworker,  I’ve been in fights, I was a college wrestler. We talk about monoliths, and the reality that in a binary, most people live in the gray. We’re not one or the other, and that doesn’t make us less-than. 

Even so, we tend to categorize ideas based on binary opposition. 

Thinking back to the binary of men and women, I ask the students who is good and who is bad. Kids argue and defend, but we don’t have a consensus. Then I ask who wears what on a stereotypical wedding day. Men wear black, black is associated with bad. Women wear white, which is associated with good, (which is problematic in its own right). 

Inevitably one of the students says this isn’t fair. 

They’re right - it isn’t. That’s the danger of binary logic, of assuming things are either good or bad. It creates an all or nothing scenario and double-standards.Binary logic is a fallacy. 

Now, if we only think of teachers as either good or bad, we are forcing them into unrealistic stereotypes. 

When teachers are associated with being martyrs, saints, nurturers, or people following a calling, and if all of this is seen and represented as good, then as soon as a teacher doesn’t want to give their life to education or be like the teachers in the inspirational movies, then there is a cultural damnation that they must be bad or selfish or deviant or lazy or mean. It sounds ridiculous, but teachers are either leaving because the expectations for being a teacher are more than what they’re willing to give, or they are seen as lazy and unintelligent. Either way, teachers are leaving as a result.

As my students point out every single year, binary logic is simplistic and unfair and most things aren’t simple enough to be one or the other. But, this is often how we interpret the world, it’s good or bad, Democrat or Republican, wrestling or basketball. You get the idea. 

So what can be done? As I said earlier, we need to first recognize that there is a stereotype and why that stereotype might be dangerous. Then, the next step would be to listen to real teachers and be able to differentiate stereotypes from reality.  The way teachers are talking about leaving education is not cinematic, it’s real, and it’s happening. 

Unlike the stereotype, real teachers are listening to their friends and family. 

Molly Waterworth: And I was talking about it with Ryan, and he was like,” Molly, you cannot keep teaching. You just can't because it ruins it ruins you emotionally.” And I'm like, Yeah, you're really right because I live for months with just dread, dread, and exhaustion. And you don't want to see anybody that you love feel that way. And it sometimes it takes that external viewpoint of like, No, this is wrecking you to to actually recognize that like, Oh, this isn't just something that I feel internally terrible about. It's obvious to other people. So this is a problem.

They realize that education doesn’t have to be a life sentence of martyrdom. 

Rachael Esh:  I've given this job and these kids everything that I have, and I don't have anything left. And that's just the reality. And it's like, I had to pick myself over them. And it's, it's like, I love them dearly, and I care about them. But I can't put my mental health on the backburner for the rest of my life. 

When people decide to become a teacher, I think everyone thinks like, oh, my gosh, you're a teacher, and you're going to be my kids teacher. And you're going to be a teacher forever. And like, that's your, that's your identity. 

I've always felt like  this wasn't necessarily my forever career, like some people have. I was like, I'm gonna do this and I want to see how it goes. And the first few years, I was like, yes, like this is, this is my jam. I'm learning so much. I just started thinking I was like every year is just the same. I'm like  a permanent sixth grader, and I was like, I am not the kind of person that can stay in a job for 30 years if I don't have any room to grow in it. I just started seeing that cycle. And, when summer comes, it's like, such a huge relief. And then when you start going back to school, just the anxiety about thinking about that already. I was like, no, I would rather have a job all year that I am not going to be completely stressed out about. 

What I heard teachers tell me is that they are dynamic humans, not cultural stereotypes. I feel that too. Teachers live in that liminal gray space in-between, just like everyone else. They are neither wholly good nor bad. So it would be great to see a cultural shift, teachers included,  in how we discuss teachers - it can start by framing them as complex humans rather than cultural tropes. This will include allowing teachers to voice concerns they have about the profession, so that things can be addressed and we can keep great teachers. 

Now, a common cultural reaction to this last statement and to teachers airing their grievances in general, is to say that, “Well, they’re just whiners.” So, if this was your reaction, it is a good time to review that lesson on binaries. If you thought the teacher sharing a concern was a whiner, then it seems like  you would prefer that teacher to remain silent. To, in essence, be a martyr. But just like binary logic, expecting teachers to be martyrs is not helpful and is based in stereotypes. 

So it would be worth reflecting on our own stereotypes about teachers, and try to humanize them. They really are just humans.

But if folks continue to struggle to separate real-life teachers from the stereotypical, dramatized, fictionalized, news-worthy, or social-media teachers, we’ll continue to struggle with holding onto brilliant teachers who won’t fit into the restrictive categorization.  

 Next time, we will talk about the purpose of public education. Many teachers are leaving because our country cannot reach a consensus on what public education is for and who it’s for. 

That will be next time on Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore. Thank you for listening. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast, leave a review, and share episodes with everyone you can think of.

This episode was produced by me, Charles Fournier. It was edited by Melodie Edwards. Other editing help came from Noa Greenspan, Sarah-Ann Leverette, and Tennesee Watson. Our theme song is by Julian Saporiti. All other music can be found on our website. A special thanks to Rachael Esh, Molly Waterworth, Dylan Bear, and Stephanie Reese for taking time to sit down and chat with. This podcast is funded in part by the Fund for Teachers Fellowship. With movie clips from Freedom Writers (Paramount Pictures), Dead Poets Society (Touchstone Pictures, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures), School of Rock (Paramount Pictures), Ferri Bueller (Paramount Pictures, United International Pictures)

 

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