Why We Need to Stop Telling Teachers They Have to “Love Their Job” to be Good at It

I recently wrote a blog post about how teachers need to stop working for free. It may be an unpopular opinion, but the age old tropes of “we do it for the outcome - not the income” are harmful to our profession and do little to uphold the fact that we are seriously educated professionals and we need to be treated as such. 

Let's look at another one of those often expressed pieces of jargon many in the educational world like to throw out: “If you don’t love teaching, get out before you cause harm to the children.” I recently read an awesome article by Elizabeth Dampf called “It's about Skillsets, Not Sainthood.” In the latest ASCD article Elizabeth Dampf shares the very familiar expectations posed by the teaching world. As teachers, it is expected that we love our jobs, love our schools, and love our students. If we don’t…why are we teachers? 

Why would we not dip into our savings to provide for our students when our meager class budgets would not cut it? Why would we not answer emails at all hours of the day when a student or parent has a question? Why would we not offer free after school tutoring to help better our students’ academic needs? All of this, Elizabeth Dampf has warned, is “a cultural illusion on which we have built a teetering system.” 

We have built education on a system of free labor, all under the guise of the idea that teachers do it because they love it. This is such an unfair narrative, and it needs to stop. Teachers are not therapists, we are not social workers, we are not doctors, nor physiologists. We are trained professionals, and we should not be bullied by society into thinking that we should be somehow grateful for the opportunity to teach and mold young minds. 

So what can we do about it? Dampf posits that it's time to uplift teachers as the professionals we are and not approach the job of a teacher as a “selfless calling.” We also need to define what good teaching looks like. We need to stop “modeling, demanding, and praising a martyr mentality from educators.” Teachers should not be chastised for working their contract hours and nothing more. They should not be  expected to work for free…period. Teachers should not be praised for all the free labor they continue to provide for their students or their schools. Effective teaching does not “hinge on clock time.” 

We need to speak up, and loudly, about how demanding our profession truly is, and how skilled we all truly are. It takes skills and practice to be able to “effectively teach other humans.” Last, we need to make sure this messaging is heard over, and over, and over again, so that the public begins to see it. Maybe then we can hold on to the very talented teachers that are still left. 

Any big brand executives out there willing to give it a shot? We need a PR team of epic proportions to change this narrative and give educators our just desserts. It's about damn time.