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My Love-Hate Relationship with Teaching

I have a confession to make, one that seemingly meets the criteria of a mundane mid-life crisis: I love what I do, but I hate my job.

I’m a kindergarten teacher by trade. I adore children—always have, always will—and have a natural affinity for the littlest learners. I enjoy watching their growth across a school year, the way they come in green and fresh as newly planted seeds at the start, and leave my classroom as saplings stretching toward the infinite sky of knowledge and understanding.

I hate the metrics that are used to define my students’ performance (and my own). I loathe the over-reliance on a narrow band of assessment measures that ignores the intangibles of student growth and extinguishes the joy of learning. I resent seeing children reduced to numbers on a grid in the name of data-based decision-making.

I cherish the time I spend with my students in the Zone of Proximal Development. I thrive on the everyday teachable moments that enable me to coach into my students’ knowledge and skills to assist them in doing what they’re not quite ready to do independently…yet.

I love listening in on children’s conversations, occasionally butting in to prod their listening and thinking to higher levels. I enjoy guiding their social navigations to a kinder, gentler, and more empathetic place, showing them how to use words to solve problems and broker peace in the microcosm of the classroom community.

I hate the rigidity of rules that dictate the exact minutes of instruction to be devoted to each and every subject area, the demands of the political powers-that-be who, lacking any substantive knowledge of child development, mistakenly believe that children are adults in small packages and should behave and respond as such.

I’m inspired by the joyful cacophony of kids at play—which also happens to the most fertile and natural medium for learning. I love the shrieks of excitement when children figure something out for the first time, and relish my role in setting up classroom experiences that promote these sorts of “a-ha moments” and let my students practice their ever-growing skills in age-appropriate and real-life ways.

I despise the chokehold that prescribed curriculum currently has on classroom learning. I hate cold, calculated, standardized expectations that presume that the brains of children are containers that can and must be filled to the brim.

I detest the way grade level benchmarks fail to consider a child’s background experience, prior knowledge, and developmental readiness. I abhor seeing five-and-six-year-olds labeled as low-achieving when they just need time for their brains to grow into the abundance of information they’ve just met for the very first time.

I love implementing new strategies and striving to improve my ability to meet the individual needs of the students in my care. Reflection is intertwined with and integrated into my teaching, every single day. I observe my students’ efforts and monitor their progress closely, valuing their brave attempts at difficult tasks, and constantly adjusting my approach as I guide their ascent toward proficiency and mastery.

I hate the way the pendulum of educational idealism and best practices swings so madly from one extreme to the other, never stopping long enough in one place to allow the best ideas and most effective strategies to be fully absorbed and assimilated.

I love laying the foundation for lifelong learning in my classroom. I love building my students’ sense of self-efficacy, growing their belief in their own capabilities as learners. I love the wilderness of their learning, littered with unpredictable and rugged pathways, some more trampled and traversed than others, yet each one leading to its own beautiful destination.

I hate formulaic predictions that lump learning into lexiles and strands, expecting evidence of student growth to be linear and ever-climbing. Just as mountain climbers experience rocky terrain and setbacks, so too do learners. At times, the journey toward understanding is one step forward and two steps back. Progress is progress, even if it includes periods of regression.

I love every second of my work with children. I hate the confining pressure-cooker context in which it occurs. 


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