Confessions of a Passionless Teacher
or How to be the Teacher Schools Deserve
Forgetting your Why
Midway through 2020’s un-precendence, Zadie Smith published a book of personal essays. In one of these, she lays out plainly her reason for writing:
the [reason] I feel deepest within myself, and which, when all is said, done, stripped away — as it is at the moment — seems to be at the truth of the matter for a lot of people, to wit: it’s something to do.
I empathize with Zadie Smith when she says later in her essay that admitting writing is merely “something to do” smacks of false humility. Of course, these feelings of perceived insincerity must be compounded when somebody as good at what she does as Zadie Smith is says it. The truth, I imagine with any artist, is that the people want to hear something more inspiring, something so powerful that it might spread some fiery passion in their own lives. In other words, “I write because it’s my calling,” is the type of thing the crowd at the book signing wants to hear. Yet, in “Something to Do,” Smith lays down the unvarnished truth for her fans: she writes for the same reason anybody does anything they don’t need to do.
Now, I’m not a writer — at least not a capital-W Writer like Smith is — and I was not thinking of writing when this idea so moved me. Rather, I was thinking about the thing I’ve chosen to spend my own forty a week doing, that is, teaching.
Perhaps teachers and artists are alike in this way. There are certain professions for which the “why” is either so self-evident — money, power, stability — it never gets asked, and there are yet others for which to ask “why?” is inherently condescending. For these reasons, I suspect Hedge Fund managers and office janitors rarely have to field this question. But teachers do. From friends, from bosses, from colleagues, from family, from strangers, the question pours out casually: “What made you want to become a teacher?”
For some, this question aggravates an already diminished sense of importance because to ask this question seems to imply teaching was somehow a bad choice. On some level, I understand this. The question “Why do you teach?” seems a shortened version of “Why do you do such a pitiful, thankless, low-paying job?” But this is not why I’ve always found this question frustrating.
The reason I’ve always struggled with this question is that I cannot seem to find a better answer to it than the one Zadie Smith provides for her own profession. I teach because it’s something to do, and I must do something. I’ve never said this to a person who’s taken it the way I mean it, which is to say that, if I must work, I may as well do something that I find, from a tolerance, work ethic, or personal aptitude perspective, doable. Like a writer at a book signing, I always get the impression people expect me to say something more fulfilling, that I teach for social justice, that I teach because I believe in children, that I teach because the next generation is the one that’ll choose whether or not to fund my social security or fix the climate. They expect passion.
But I’m not a passionate teacher, and I don’t come to work every day out of some sense of civic duty or moral obligation. Most days, I don’t even particularly like the job. But I must do something, and teaching is something, and, seven years on, it’s something I can, more or less, stand. Plus there’s the summers off.
Passion without Pay
It’s certainly unpopular, or maybe uncouth to explicitly mention, but I know I’m not the only passionless teacher. I think we may soon even become the majority.
Of course it’s not always easy to feel good about it. Recently, as an example, my wife and I have taken to watching Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, but not the in-your-face, overly dramatized American version. Instead, we enjoy the British version, where Gordon plays the role of the expert consultant rather than the pugnacious boss. The show is, and this is almost hard to admit, inspiring, even if you know most of the restaurants — despite solid council — still fail. This inspiration comes from Gordon himself as he demonstrates that, unlike families in Tolstoy, all bad restaurants are bad for the same reason: a lack of passion.
Most of the episodes play out the same. Gordon quizzes the struggling head chef, owner, or manager until he finds out just exactly when, how, and why they lost their passion for food. You can’t make good food, he’ll argue, without passion. And Gordon’s culinary passion is, even for a viewer who has no more than an armchair interest in the restaurant business, contagious. My wife and I both agree that, if we had to work in a kitchen, we’d like to work for Gordon Ramsay because, as confrontational, quick-tempered, and blunt-to-a-fault as he is, his demands of perfection and passion have an unexpected positive moral to them.
I can’t help myself, some days, from trying to translate Gordon’s passion for the restaurant business to my own work in the classroom. Surely if the preparation of food has passion as a prerequisite, classroom teaching must doubly call for it.
Imagine if a school were run like a Gordon Ramsay restaurant: Teachers planning out curricula like Michelin-star chefs crafting menus that perfectly balance flavors; treating individual lessons like an every-plate-perfect entree with each grain of rice deliberately positioned; grading papers like a delicately paletted food critic who can use words like “mouthfeel” and “umami bomb” and mean them. Some mornings I go to work imagining this. Some mornings I try to be the change I want to see in the education world.
But your average American high school is the death of passion. And when it isn’t, passion often ends up being the death of educators.
The first problem is that the American public school system tries to promote passion but has no real way of rewarding it. Schools have no analogue to the owner-chefs whose toil can turn to cash in his pocket or the budding chefs cutting their teeth before they go open up their own place. The best most districts can offer is an archaic — though admittedly egalitarian — system of pay increases that relies on graduate credits and work experience. Other than that, the best most great teachers can hope for are soft rewards like better course loads or to stop teaching altogether and enter into the world’s worst middle-management job: building administrator.
All that is to say that the dedicated and passionate teacher — the teacher who holds office hours thrice a week, who whiles away evenings putting feedback on papers, who is always “there” for the students, who has a knack for turning any abstract concept concrete and understandable — must be perpetually propelled by non-financial “fulfillment,” not really need money, or have a martyr complex.
Here’s a sad and unsavory truth: If you are the teacher above, assuming we have the same years’ experience, you get the same exact paycheck I get for doing just enough work to renew my contract every year. In fact, all I have to do to keep getting paid the same as you is work harder than the bottom 10% of the building and my job is as good as safe. Again, it might not sound pretty, but it’s generally how things work: there are a lot of teachers like me. This approach might be lazy or cynical or harmful to outcomes, but quiet quitting — and I think it’s either teaching or the DMV that invented quiet quitting — is a reasonable response to the public school system’s inability — or unwillingness — to adapt to the modern professional landscape. If anything, teaching as a profession in recent years has actually regressed.
The State of the Profession
What even is teaching in 2024? It’s a battlefield of box checking and rubber stamping. It’s a minefield of red tape, anxiety, and fear. It’s a race to the bottom where the most successful faculty — that is, the ones who survive the longest — are often dead, passionless machines who do what they are told so they can reach the coveted carrot on a stick that is a state pension. Schools, at least the ones I’ve worked in, now have so much paperwork, so many rules in place, so many procedures and routines, so many standards, assessments, norms, policies, deadlines, that the interpretation most struggling students have of school — namely that the school is the enemy and the teachers, even the nice ones, are an agent of that enemy — feels correct to anybody paying attention.
In a modern American classroom, the teacher is reimagined not as a chaperone on the pathway to enlightenment, but rather as a Warden dispensing discipline and measuring outcomes under a system which mistakes compliance for achievement and confuses measures with targets. This has pushed students away, which has then forced the hands of teachers and administrators who must now double down on discipline because students feel alienated from the value of education and thus act out. As students act out more, teachers and administrators become stricter and stricter, and fun and creativity in classes becomes rarer and rarer until we get to where we are now.
But the negative feedback loop is even more insidious than it sounds. Think for a moment of the kinds of skills you need to be an excellent teacher: the down-to-the-minute-6-months-out planning; the creativity required to produce 6 1-hour-long, interactive presentations a day; the balancing of compassion with discipline, of planning with grading, of practice with assessment; the mental strain of having to stand in front of a class that humiliated you yesterday; and the stamina required to do it all over again tomorrow. Now think of the kind of person who would — no, who could — do this work, then consider their other options. This is the challenge the future of education in America faces. The job, with some exceptions, has become difficult and life-killing enough that nobody who could do a it well wants to do it anymore.
Yet schools must be staffed, and the show must go on. But what are you left with when all the would-be talented teachers run away to law offices, consulting firms, or Silicon Valley? You’re left with the passionless. The teachers cum bureaucrats. The box checkers. The pension seekers. The ones who teach because they can’t do. You’re left with me.
The Trouble with Teaching
Here’s something you learn when you lose your passion. Teaching is hard, but maintaining a job as one is the simplest thing in the world.
Let me explain the former first because, while teaching has built up a reputation as being a difficult and thankless job, the actual, day-to-day frustrations are not well-known to the public. I think the easiest way for a non-educator to understand what truly makes the job difficult is to view the profession through the lens of failure. That is, we should think about all the places in this line of work where things can go wrong — big or small — and then consider the demoralizing effects this can have on teachers.
Let’s start at the basics. Here’s something that is so obvious in public-school teaching that it mostly doesn’t get mentioned: most students in your classroom (1) don’t really want to be there and (2) don’t really want to learn your content. From these simple, yet inarguable, premises almost all of the frustrations in modern American education follow. The fact is that, and this gets worse as you descend the socio-economic ladder, students feel alienated from the value of the content taught in most schools, especially high schools. Of course, university acceptance and career opportunities do motivate some (usually richer) students, but the fact remains that the content taught in most classes is not a strong motivator on its own.
What this means is that, if a teacher wants to be successful, they must become expert motivators. This is the first point of failure most new teachers encounter, and it can be summed up easily: your content knowledge and passion mean nothing if your students won’t do work. This is why, despite good arguments against them, many teachers latch onto dated concepts like letter grades, averages, strict deadlines, and extra credit assignments. What all teachers must do is find ways to get students to learn things they don’t really want to learn. Put like this, the whole concept of compulsory education begins to feel misguided.
It’s hard to explain how frustrating this is, especially considering teachers, as a general rule, tend to be motivated learners themselves. That is to say that, as a teacher, the value of academic study is so immediately apparent that it’s not only difficult to transcribe that value to an unmotivated student, it’s also disenchanting when one fails to successfully do so. Thus, teachers fail at motivation all the time.
But motivating students falls under the umbrella of classroom management, and this problem would exist even if none of the other problems in education did. That is to say, managing your classroom is, in and of itself, a trying job, but to focus only on it is to ignore what goes on behind the scenes. There’s the obvious stuff like lesson planning, grading, and professional development that everybody knows about, but there are even more tedious tasks expected of teachers, most of which exist thanks to poor policies at district, state, and federal levels.
For example, most school districts have home-communication expectations that are, even to the most dedicated professionals, unsustainable and, thus, another point of failure. Because talking to a parent is seen as effective in correcting behavioral and academic infractions, schools require contact home for all manner of offenses: take a student’s phone away, contact home; student skips your class, contact home; student talks back to you, contact home; student is failing your class, contact home; student slept through your class, contact home; student forgot their laptop, contact home; student wouldn’t take their hood off in your class, contact home; student threw an eraser every time you turned your back, contact home.
When it comes to communication home, if you want to meet the idealized benchmark, you’ll be spending a significant amount of your afterschool time simply calling, texting, and emailing parents. If you do not, or if you don’t do it enough, it’s just another place where you can feel like you didn’t meet professional expectations, another micro failure.
Then there’s the Individualized Education Plan or IEP. This is one area of the job most non teachers don’t know anything about, but it soaks up a huge chunk of a diligent teacher’s time. An IEP is an official — and legally binding — document that metes out what are called accommodations and modifications based on a student’s individual needs. Usually IEP accommodations are based on specific disabilities. The thing is, and like everything in education this gets harder in underserved districts, it falls on the classroom teacher to provide students with accommodations. What this means in practical terms is that a teacher is not only responsible for planning a lesson on a subject, but also responsible for making slightly altered versions of said lesson to meet the needs of the IEP holders in class. And accommodations can vary wildly amongst a single class. You might have one student who requires special seating, extra time on assignments, words banks for quizzes, and sentence frames for writing, but also another student who requires a reduced work load, frequent movement breaks, and read-alouds. It’s not uncommon to have 15 students in a particular class each with their own IEPs — and some of these IEPs can list more than 10 accommodations.
Yet the teacher’s job is to make sure every single accommodation for every single student in every single class is met 100% of the time, and the administration is often quick to remind you that IEPs are legally binding. This might be the biggest point of failure for modern educators: legally binding or not, it’s not just impractical to faithfully deliver all IEP services to all students all the time, it might actually be impossible. Imagine being told that you have a task that you likely will not be able to complete successfully but if you don’t complete it you are breaking the law.
Kafka, Camus, Heller — you choose which -esque you want to call this, but the truth is there is nothing worse for professional morale than being given a job you literally cannot actually do. But workloads that cannot actually be accomplished is now a hallmark of the profession. Whether you fail on a given day by not delivering certain IEP services, by not contacting home, by forgetting to take attendance, by not meeting grading deadlines, by not checking arbitrary boxes on endless paperwork, or by not preparing for a lesson because you had to cover chemistry. Or maybe, and this is the most common by far, you will fail because you simply run out of energy on some days to effectively manage your classroom and its endless, tedious frustrations of nurse passes, bathroom breaks, office referrals, pencil sharpening, material gathering, technology collecting, volume redirections, real-time feedback, seating charts, behavior warnings, students sleeping, students crying, students opting out, and on and on and on.
The point is, as a teacher, you will fail, and you will fail frequently as you deliver your six lessons a day. But if you want to actually effectively teach your subject, you’re going to have to try your best every single day to do well at every single task I just described and countless others besides.
But here’s the thing. The job, in a lot of ways, is only as hard as you make it. And holding a job as a teacher, especially once you pass year three (or whatever year marks your tenure/professional status in your district), is actually easy. All it takes is a healthy dose of cynicism.
Teaching is Easy, Actually
The trick is to stop caring. This is a hard step for a lot of teachers to make. Teachers are almost universally kind-hearted people, and even the most cynical of them still, on some level, care about other people. The line I hear the most is, “Yeah, but it’s for the kids.” This excuse is used as a coping mechanism by teachers who know they are getting shafted. But it’s also used as a blatant, unfair, and ill-intentioned weapon of manipulation by exploitative school boards and administrators. I’ve seen, “I do it for the kids” used to justify enough free labor to make any industrialist smile. Chaperoning Prom for free? It’s for the kids. Another year with a raise that doesn’t match inflation? Look the kids need me. How much did you spend on those notebooks for your classes? I bought them for the kids. Why won’t you interview somewhere else? I don’t want to abandon the kids. How can you possibly leave mid year? Don’t you care about the kids?
But this thinking is becoming less and less common, and across the board teachers are beginning to care less and less. And it’s hard to blame them.
The first thing you have to stop caring about is also the hardest, though. If you want to make it long-term in the teaching profession, you have to get used to one thing and one thing only: humiliation. It’s easy at first to be frustrated as a teacher because schools no longer fail anybody, no longer expel anybody, and no longer seem to do literally anything about student (mis)behavior that works. It’s also easy to find this degrading. Imagine another professional environment where somebody in your space (in this case, a classroom) can call you a racial or homophobic slur and be back in that exact same space the next day. And then imagine they can do it again and again and again. But we’re at a point now, in most districts, where students can get away with anything but murder — almost literally — and still be welcomed back into the class environment. And administration will tell you that you must approach that kid who just yesterday told you to kill yourself, or to shut the fuck up, or to suck his dick with respect and a completely blank slate. This seems like hyperbole, but it is reality for thousands of teachers in this country.,
But there’s also more subtle humiliations teachers have to learn to ignore. There’s also bathroom duties, there’s pass restrictions (which usually involve you having to Slack a member of the admin team anytime specific children need to urinate), there’s justifying to guidance counselors why a student earned a C on a poem, there’s admin who talk to you like you’re a child, there’s “Professional Development” sessions where people with PhDs make you use crayons to write nice things about your coworkers. The entire culture of the teaching profession seems purpose-built to remind us every day that we aren’t trained and educated professionals— we are overqualified babysitters.
But the future belongs to those teachers who can master the art of stoicism to the point where they can go home every day and forget completely about the 8 hours of humiliation they just endured. These are the ones who will make it to their pension. They are the ones who, at their retirement pizza party after school, their colleagues will unironically call a “hero.”
But survival in education is more than just being ok with degradation. All teachers are given impossible workloads, so the good ones must prioritize. Because lesson-planning demands, thanks to 504s, IEPs, state standards, and looming assessments, are so overwhelming, most districts have opted for using pre-packaged materials and unit plans. This makes lesson planning a matter of printing out worksheets, handing them out, and standing guard at the front of the room to make sure students are working. Teachers will often then employe the beautifully named “Principle of Universal Design” to make sure they can meet IEP requirements with minimal effort. What this translates to is teachers giving work to everybody that is designed to be accessible to the lowest-skilled person in their classes. This results in a good chunk of the class being unchallenged while the other half are over disciplined.
Of course, a lot of teachers are bothered by the canned curricula private companies are peddling and districts are scoffing up. Those teachers won’t last. If you want to last, you have to abandon preconceived notions of a creative, fun, and interesting learning environment and embrace the modern vision of education: students in rows filling out packets of paperwork by themselves.
Then there’s the issue of pass rates. This seems an almost insurmountable task for the modern educator. Imagine you have a classroom full of students reading significantly below grade level. You know you must hold kids to high standards. You also know that students probably won’t be able to meet those standards, that most students, if somehow graded objectively at the end of the year, probably won’t actually have made the necessary growth to pass your class. Finally, you know that, probably, one of your yearly goals has something to do with pass rates. So what to do? If you’re a good teacher you work extra hard to get kids that extra mile (and probably still fail), but if you’re in this game for the long run, all you have to do is pass them anyway.
This sounds like I’m being overly cynical, especially when graduation rates are indeed on the rise. But if you consider for a second that graduation rates are increasing while test scores are decreasing, it doesn’t take a particularly pessimistic mind to figure out something fishy is going on. The truth is that it is actually incredibly — incredibly — difficult to fail out of high school in 2024. Most students who manage it, do so because of appalling attendance. The truth is, in a climate where every student must succeed, grades no longer work as a motivator because, and I imagine this is true everywhere, schools will find ways to get under-credited students to graduate, and these ways are almost never wholly ethical.
But none of this matters if you just play the game. My experience has shown me that as long as students are passing your class no questions will ever be asked. It’s when students start failing the questions begin rolling in.
But here is where we get to what, in my opinion, is the sorriest truth about education in America: the best way to survive in teaching is to not serve the children. The best way to survive in American education is to play along, hand out the canned coursework, pass every single student, wipe away your memory of the day’s humiliations on your commute home, and spend your summers in at the beach, the ball game, or the country club thinking about anything at all except how much of a waste of time the profession has become.
Maybe mid May is making me cranky, but if the profession has become teachers not teaching and learners not learning, what exactly is the point of secondary education? I guess, at the end of the day, we — that is, educators — can at least take solace in the fact that we can, should we choose, put “hero” on our resumes.
