1: Fight, Flight, or Apathy

Those Who Can't Teach Anymore

We are witnessing a mass exodus of teachers from education. My wife, Jennie, is one of those teachers that left. She, like many educators, was tired of not being treated like a professional. Even for me, a high school English teacher, the job is getting harder. So I go in search of answers. In this episode, we hear from Jennie and two other former teachers about why they left teaching. From struggles with mental health, to low pay, to a lack of autonomy in the classroom - they give insight into why we are losing good teachers across the country.

Music:

Theme Song By Julian Saporiti

“Worky Work” by Andy G. Cohen is licensed under a CC BY license.

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

“Take it Back” by Crowander is licensed under a CC BY-NC license

“Machinery” by eddy is licensed under a CC BY-NC license

“So Far So Close” by Jahzzar is licensed under a CC BY-SA license.

“Patriotic Songs of America” by the New York Military Band and the American Quartet is licensed under a CC BY-NC license

“Another Rainy Day” by Scott Holmes Music is licensed under a CC BY license.

“Everest” by Scott Holmes Music is licensed under a CC BY license

Transcript:

I was a Junior in high school when my English teacher, Ms. Dianne Panazzo assigned us to write a paper that explored our backgrounds. I wrote about a neighborhood game of capture the flag. In the middle of our game, we came across a soft-top, convertible. It was parked in the lumber yard of the hardware store at the end of our block. Our pursuit of the flag came to a standstill to look at this car. We lived in a small town in western New York – a place of rusted trucks and economy vehicles.

One of the boys that lived across the street from us always wore camo and did reconnaissance missions into his neighbor’s house. He was pretty sure the car belonged to a guy who was trying to shut down his dad’s business. With the logic of 10-year-olds, we felt a sense of duty to retaliate against any encroachment on locally owned, businesses so we stacked lumber and bags of concrete on the car.

Then, my camo-wearing neighbor climbed onto the hood of the car and threw a cinderblock into the windshield. There was this cinematic pause, as we gathered our senses, and then we destroyed that car. Lumber and tree branches went through the windows, the soft top was punctured – more cinderblocks made pieces of the car – it was a mess. When we were done, we finished our game of capture the flag and went home at curfew. Later, 2 police officers visited our door, looking for the vandals. Lawlessness that my oldest brother assured them that we had nothing to do with.

My essay explored how this story was a metaphor for rock and roll. I know, but it was high school – I was trying to be edgy and profound.

My teacher, Ms. Panazzo, applauded my writing and had me walk across the hall to Mr. Wacker’s room. This was not because Wacker was more or less of an expert on writing or deviance. Panazzo sent students to Wacker as a way to celebrate and share writing. These were teachers who collaborated often, believed in the writing process, and took efforts to teach students how valuable their writing was. Sending a student to Wacker was a novel way to give kids a feeling of getting published.

Wacker was on plan, crouched over a stack of papers, pen in hand, at his desk in the back of an empty, dimly-lit classroom. I had never interacted with him before. He had a reputation of being dynamic, kind, and willing to be outrageous – he’s the guy that put on a foam ten-gallon hat and had a stick horse race in front of the school at a pep-rally. To Wacker, shame was for suckers.

I told him that Panazzo had sent me. He had me sit in a chair to the side of his desk so he could listen to me read my essay. I read and Wacker nodded, gasped, said, “uh-huh,” now and again – all of the things that I wanted to hear as a young writer.

He handed me praise balanced with some advice and sent me back to class. I was impressed by how willing he was to listen to me, to inspire and encourage me. A kid that wasn’t his student, interrupting his planning time, to read an essay about young stupidity. That moment was pivotal in my desire to be a writer. And I’m not the only student that Panazzo sent to read to Wacker. My wife, Jennica – she goes by Jennie – had a similar experience.

This is what made Wacker a great teacher and what inspires me in my teaching practice still. His willingness to take time for others, whether he knew them or not.

But Wacker isn’t a teacher anymore. 15 years and over a thousand students after our first meeting, Wacker quit. He told me it was a matter of life or death.

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.

My name is Charles Fournier. I am a high school English teacher. In the 10 years that I’ve been teaching, brilliant teachers have been leaving the profession, my wife included. And those numbers have only increased with Covid. So in order to root out why teachers are leaving and reflect on my own ambivalence towards teaching, I spent this summer traveling, researching, and interviewing teachers, parents, students, legislators, professors, and administrators to try to find out why good people are leaving education.

This is a national problem. In February of 2022, the National Education Association (NEA) reported that 55% of teachers are thinking about leaving the profession earlier than they had planned. And last spring, in my state of Wyoming, a University of Wyoming survey showed that 65% of surveyed Wyoming teachers would quit teaching if they could. Think of that…about two thirds of the teachers in your kids’ school right now want to leave. That’s an astonishing number. So I figured Wyoming would be a good place to start. If it’s bad here, a state that is seen as a haven for having some of the highest teacher salaries in the past decade, we know it’s bad. Maybe salaries aren’t the only thing causing teachers to leave.

This podcast will explore the reasons teachers leave. We will look at how low pay, ignored mental health, lack of respect and autonomy, and mandated education policy influence teachers’ decisions to go. And how these things are not new…take a look at our education system’s history. We’ve talked about reforms for generations. Or think about how teachers are depicted in movies or in political debates. The images of martyrs or slobs also make an impact. Things have been accumulating for a while. And we could see this crisis a long way off.

I have wanted to write this podcast since my wife left teaching. And then two more of my favorite colleagues left education just one after the other. So today, I will be starting close to home to find out why teachers are leaving.

But before we begin, a quick warning, this episode discusses miscarriage, abuse, and suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide, please call the national suicide hotline at 988.

Here is part 1: “Fight, Flight, or Apathy”

Jennica: My first year was with you was a ton of fun.

Jennie and I started teaching at the same school in a small agricultural town on the eastern border of Wyoming. I taught English and she taught Chemistry and Biology.

Jennica: Then you wanted to kind of get out of education for a little bit. So you went and got your Masters.

I returned to school to get a Masters degree in Literature, and Jennie started teaching in a new district. She collaborated with the University in town, took kids on field trips into the community and had a wonderful time teaching. But after I earned my Masters, we moved again, and we got to teach together again in a new district. This was what we’d talked about since our Freshman year in college – to teach in the same building together for the rest of our careers.

And working together was amazing, but we didn’t realize the toll teaching was taking.

Jennica: We had gotten pregnant. And we felt like, oh, gosh, like, we're gonna double down on this career. And we're going to be teachers till we retire. And that felt awful. I felt defeated.

Thinking of teaching for another 25-30 years made us very aware that we were more dissatisfied with teaching than we thought. We liked the idea of having kids but now it felt like we were stuck in this career. Then in October, we had a miscarriage. Jennie told me that she felt something wrong in class while she was teaching. She eyed the door and waited for someone to pass her room, so she didn’t leave her students unattended. When a principal walked past, she asked him to cover her class, and she ran to the bathroom. Jennie said it was all so fast for her – it was almost a blur. And then she went back to teaching during the same class period in a fog. In another profession, it would have been easy to take the afternoon off, but here she would have had to plan for a sub, which included potentially explaining why she needed coverage on such short notice. She wasn’t prepared at that time to do this for such a personal and confusing experience. She said it was surreal for her to brush herself off, put on a smile, and keep on with her lesson. She wasn’t even completely sure if she had miscarried until it was confirmed that afternoon at the doctor’s office.

There are no standard ways to grieve. We went to the mountains and talked and thought and cried and we tried to answer why such things happen.

Jennie’s mom always tells us, “You know, everything happens for a reason.” So we were trying to find one.

Jennica: It was sad to have our miscarriage but at the same time, it was like, well, the door’s open again, and leaving this career, is something that I've been thinking about for a little bit. And so it just solidified that I should take advantage of this moment to do something that I wanted to do.

When Jennie was still pregnant, our lives seemed laid out in front of us, and we had accepted that. But our miscarriage gave us a moment to reflect, and we realized that the life we almost had – a life that included teaching for the rest of our careers – was not the life we wanted. We felt like if it wasn’t our time to become parents, maybe we were supposed to be doing something else or taking another path. I had just gotten my Masters, so it was Jennie’s turn to decide what she wanted her life to look like.

Many of the reasons Jennie wanted to leave education had a lot to do with not feeling valued and trusted as a professional – all things that contributed to her own self-worth:

Jennica: I didn't feel like I had a lot of autonomy. It was all guaranteed and viable curriculum. And I didn't have a lot of wiggle room.

For those of you who don’t know, a Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum or GVC is an effort to ensure the same quality of curriculum is presented to all students. They are the culmination of efforts to standardize education, and they act like a middle-man to the Common Core Standards. Most states adopted the Common Core Standards, which if followed should already guarantee an equitable education, but the GVCs are used to map how those standards are reached.

Jennica: I felt like I was getting critiqued by people that should have been showing me what to do or helping me to grow. And I just didn't get a lot of affirmation that I needed. I got it in my reviews. I always got really great reviews from administrators, but I just didn't get it from my department. I didn't feel like I was an intelligent person. And I didn't feel like I was doing enough at any given time.

Part of this feeling came from having to play the role of a disciplinarian, to uphold rules that she didn’t see value in.

Jennica: I would have appreciated the administrators focusing more on what the students were learning in my class versus how students were behaving. And it's strange that I was expected to be a disciplinarian with absolutely no teeth. I don't even think I had the option of having kids have detention after school with me. I think I would have gotten in trouble for making them clean desks after they drew little wieners on the desks. I just felt like I had no control. If I were to send students to the office because of their behavior. It's like a mark against you. You know, you have teachers bragging that they've never sent students to the office. You can hear administrators talking about, “Well that teacher always sends me that student, they need to handle it on their own.” But there's really no way to handle it in your classroom.You know, you call home and the parents just as much of a jerk to you as the child is. And there's just, there's no respect for the teacher from any end.

As I did interviews, I kept coming back to these questions: What is the role of teachers in education? How many hats do teachers really need to wear? Teachers are expected to do a lot and sometimes it feels like that includes being a parent. Most teachers have probably had this similar conversation with a parent. The parent says something like, “I don’t know what to do with (insert student name). What should I do?”

This is a tough question. When I’ve tried to answer it, it’s from the lens of a teacher, not a parent. Because if my answer was from what I would do as a parent, it might seem like I’m criticizing their parenting.

Jennica: I don't want to have to be the parent, I want to be the teacher. And I think that parents should let teachers be teachers, and that they should play the parent role.

I'm an expert in my field. I have a degree in both chemistry and education, and I understand how people learn and I understand what needs to be taught. And parents aren't experts in that field. And I don't think that they need to think that they are experts or control that. Do I think that teachers should just go in without like it's the Wild West and just do whatever they want? No, but I think the oversight should not be parent driven. I think it needs to be expert driven.

This would mean trusting teachers as experts in both their content and in the delivery of that content. That trust might start with getting rid of phrases like, Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” Trusting teachers to do their jobs recognizes that teachers “Can Do” that’s why they “Can Teach.” If we continue to distrust teachers’ capabilities to do their jobs, we might have to rely on a new phrase as teachers continue to leave, a phrase that Jennie came up with - Those who can’t, teach…anymore.

Outside of education, most advisory boards of any field are typically made up of experts in those fields. Education boards and even education legislation aren’t often like that. School boards are made up of non or former educators, and education legislation, at least in Wyoming, is rarely developed by educators.

Questioning teacher expertise is a national issue. And the national issues are contributing to why teachers are leaving.

Jennica: So the the micro environment that I was in played a part, but then when you went home and read the news, or you, you thought about the bigger picture when it comes to how teachers are viewed, that didn't help it didn't soothe me when I got home.

Hearing about school shootings is devastating and terrifying. Every story makes me think about what if it happened here? When Jennie taught with me, my first thought when going through my imaginary scenario was always, “Will she be safe? Could I prevent a shooter from making their way towards her end of the building?”

Jennica: Thinking about teachers having guns in the classroom, thinking about how I should protect students that weren't mine, they weren't my children, and how it was my job to sort of be selfless, you know, throw my body in front of them. I didn't really feel like that was my role. I'm really good at teaching people how to balance an equation. And I'm really good at inspiring kids and coaching them on what they're good at and encouraging them to keep going through hard problems. But I don't really think that my role as a teacher was to be a martyr for other people's children.

So we had had a lockdown. That was a real lockdown.

There was a shooting in the neighborhood near the school, and the shooter was still on the loose, so this is what caused the lockdown.

A lockdown requires classes to be buttoned down – doors shut, blinds down, students out of sight of any windows and silent. We practice these often. Once, during a teacher development day, we practiced with fake active shooters to hear what guns would sound like going off in the hallways. I remember sitting in a classroom with my brother – we also teach together – and thinking about the absurdity of having to have officers fire blanks from automatic rifles to prepare us for what could happen.

So Jennie was caught in a real lockdown, meaning she had to get students behind a locked door.

Jennica: And I was just panicking about the students and they weren't really like on my side. They weren't coming into the classroom, they weren't staying quiet. And it was just a terrible experience. And I just didn't want to be trapped in that. That's not what I signed up for. I signed up to teach people things, not to save their lives.

So after 7 years of teaching, she left.

Jennica: When I got accepted into pharmacy school, I was expecting to wait like two weeks after my interview to find out but they pulled me into the dean's office. And they told me that I was accepted, and I just started crying right away because I knew I could quit teaching. I knew that I was going to escape an environment that I was very sad to be in every day. They cried because they thought I cried because I was getting into pharmacy school, but really I was crying because I was getting out of education.

This transition out of teaching had a massive impact on her well-being.

Jennica: My self-esteem is incredibly higher than it was before. You know, I used to be very depressed, and I was overweight when I was a teacher. And I just didn't really feel good about myself. And I wasn't getting a lot of positive affirmation from my peers and other teachers. I really thought, like, maybe I'm just not very smart or capable.

I'm sure that you remember the first time that I came home from that anatomy class and I came home with a list of anatomy, and I just bawled.

She worried that she wasn’t smart enough. But, she studied, sometimes over the phone with me as she commuted to her classes, and she finished at the top of that class. And she’s continued to be at the top of her pharmacy classes since.

Jennica: I have a 4.0, in pharmacy school, and I have a lot of achievements. And it's something that I wasn't made to believe that I could do before.

Of course, Jennie’s decision to leave education makes me think more about my own longevity in this career. I know why Jennie quit, and I get it. I can’t say that I haven’t thought about leaving either – I have and I do. And I think about it more and more when the people that I admire and love leave or when the woes of America’s problems are traced back to the education system – a system that is ironically hobbled then blamed for not meeting all of the expectations placed on it.

Shane Atkinson taught in the same building Jennie and I taught in, and when he left teaching, he told me that he found a career that allowed him to merge his morals and values with his work.. He actually started his career teaching with one of the most noble reasons I’ve ever heard.

Shane met me for a drink in Fort Collins. I set up mics at a picnic bench, shaded by a low hanging tree – Shane rode up on his bike, ordered a beer, and told me about when he decided to become a teacher.

Atkinson: It’s gonna sound almost untrue how crazy it was.

Shane went to college for journalism – he thought of it as the 4th branch of government. While Shane was in college, his cousin, James, who was more like an older brother, taught middle school in the same town. During this time, James was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma after having battled colon cancer and liver cancer since he was 18. The Hodgkin’s Lymphoma was fatal.

Atkinson: When he passed away, we were just floored by the support from the school from the students. Students were coming into hospice. We had stacks and stacks of letters and cards that kids had written. A kid came in and played guitar when he was in his last days, played a song for him. We went to his classroom, saw where he taught, all of us together. His coworkers were telling us how he would schedule his chemo appointments super early in the morning, so he couldn't make it to his first class. So he was teaching just extremely ill, and I was honestly, you know, losing my brother. But one of the final thoughts that I had throughout all of that was that he made an impact, right? On all these kids. It was very clear looking at all the cards and going through all of that. He made an impact and he was taken too early. And you know, 25 years old, go forward in your life and think how many other kids might have impacted? So the last words I told him was I'm changing my major. I'm going to try to impact some of these kids that you didn't get the opportunity to.

And things went well in the beginning. Shane felt like he was reaching kids with important conversations – he even developed a new course called Human Genocide and Behavior. Then cultural shifts started to affect Shane’s classroom in the 13 years between when he started teaching and when he left.

Atkinson: And in that time period, there were immense changes in education, in our society, and politics in the way that people thought about each other and treated each other, and it started to come into my classroom. And it happened slowly. It's the frog in boiling water analogy. Because had my first year of teaching then even remotely close to my last, I would have been gone after a year.

When I asked Shane about shifting cultural views about education, we started to talk about the purpose of education - Why are we here? For Shane, he turns to the founding fathers:

Atkinson: I think many of our founding fathers have been attributed to this quote, that a democracy is only as strong as its citizens are educated.

This idea can be seen in a 1786 letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to George Wythe. Jefferson wrote:

“I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom and happiness.”

Jefferson and other founders made efforts to prioritize and secure educational opportunities for the general public. In so many words, they emphasized that a public needs to be educated so they can recognize their own rights and privileges and make sure the government is working for them. Of course, this so-called generalized public that the founding fathers were referencing was exclusive to white men but over the decades we’ve expanded that to all Americans.

Shane held onto the idea that education was for helping develop good and active citizenry.

Shane: So, I really do think that in the social sciences, it should be about creating good citizens, people who are informed people who can work together, even a spirit of bipartisanship, that you can have different viewpoints. We need to start with a certain set of facts that we can all agree on. But ultimately, there's a lot of room for differing opinions. I mean, we're all a product of the experiences that we have lived and those around us that influence us to think about certain things the way we do. And that's great, I think it's important to understand and notice and realize that, and then also realize that it's not necessarily always right. That there isn’t always a right answer. But sometimes there are wrong answers.

Part of creating good citizens in Shane’s mind was to build quality relationships with students, which required some authenticity on his part. So if a student asked Shane his opinion on an issue, he felt like this opened up an opportunity to have an authentic, civilized conversation with his class.

Shane: I almost felt like I had to be honest with them, but also demonstrate here's how I view this issue. But I'm just one person. And here's why I view it that way. And here are some of my experiences and biases. Identify your biases. Then you can also show that, “Look, I respect you. And I can earn your respect, although we disagree a lot with one another.”

And that's really what our country is lacking right now. I used to be able to have a conversation with kids about a current issue. And 100% explore both sides of that issue. If overwhelmingly, the class is on one side, the teacher's role at that point is not to reaffirm what they believe. It's to say there is another side to this issue.

This is part of the joy of teaching. Challenging students to have a metacognitive moment or a moment when they can reflect on why they think the way that they do. This level of critical thinking and conversation is where learning occurs.

That used not be problematic in the first five years that I taught. It started becoming…and it happened like that…where if I said, even just in through the Socratic method or just getting kids to, to consider the other prospective, parents were coming in parent meetings, administration meetings where it was like, “Eid you say this to your class?” Yeah, we're talking about current issues that are happening in the world right now. How can you really teach kids to think of the world in which they live if you can’t broach these subjects.

Shane points out that censuring what teachers can broach in an academic arena is making everyone suffer. I know that feeling. I used to teach the President’s State of the Union address every year to look at rhetoric in the speech, but I stopped because of constantly rising political tensions and recommendations from administrators to avoid politics.

For Shane, when he couldn’t have important conversations in his classroom, that was suffering. Those limits hinder the effectiveness of a classroom, and they can take away from a teacher’s joy of having an impact. This inevitably hurts kids..

Atkinson: I feel like you have three options. Fight, flight, or apathy. So you always hear about these teachers who are just like, I don't care, “Whatever. Here's a worksheet. Sure you want an A, I'll give you an A. You don't have to learn a dang thing.” I feel like those are your choices. One of those three paths.

And I was 37 at the time, and, if there's going to be a career change… Can I find something else to do that more aligns my beliefs, and at the very least, doesn't emotionally scar me? Everyone knows about the Sunday scaries. Or you come back from winter break, and you can't sleep the night before summer break. And there's just a sense of impending dread and doom. And I think that's because you're constantly in that, what do I do? Do I fight? Do I flight? Or do I become apathetic? Because what I'm doing is not aligning with what's best practice and what's best for students, what's best for society. They tell you all the time, this isn't just a job. This is more than a job. Which, to me, says that there's some sort of moral benefit. I mean, they're not paying you, that's for sure. So what do you gain from that? Well, it's the belief that you're making a difference.. And the administration will tell you that all the time. If you don't think you are, you don't think you can. Then what do you do?

I am very familiar with the feeling of dread - once the theme for Sunday night football plays out, my gut drops. This cycle of feeling dread or feeling like you’re making a difference all while deciding if you should be fighting the system, fleeing the system, or becoming apathetic to the system is one that several teachers brought up in their interviews. And it’s a trend that Shane’s wife noticed and was concerned about.

You get home from work, and you talk about what's going on in your life, how you're doing, how your day went. And I would just come home, just fuming, fuming. And she would say, she told me for years, “Leave or do something else. This is not good for you. This is not good for your mental state.” And then I would get an email from a kid that I had five years ago, checking in saying, “Hey, I just wanted to give you an update. You know, I'm on my way to grad school. I'm studying this thing. I still think about stuff I learned in your class.” And it's like, wow, and it brings you right back. And my wife said it's an abusive relationship. It's a domestic violence relationship. He can beat the crap out of you. And you are beaten down, emotionally scarred, and then it's a hug, an I love you, a nice gesture, and it sucks you right back in, just to get abused again. And my wife was in an abusive relationship when she was younger. And that's how she described it.

Shane left teaching after 13 years, and he now works in government. He rides his bike to work, and he said that he’s excited to go to work, that he’s never actually worked harder than he is at this moment.

Every Time I talk with Shane, I walk away feeling like it was time well spent. I end up being a little fired up about something. This is a big reason students loved him – even students who didn’t see eye to eye with him. Shane made them think and talk and explore their ideas, and he wasn’t willing to sacrifice his values for the letters of appreciation, though I’m pretty sure that those letters will still be finding their way to Shane.

And this is what makes me worried for education. Good teachers are leaving. Teachers that make impacts on kids. Teachers that a person will write to years after graduation to catch up, to say thank you, or to invite them to a wedding. When these teachers, the ones reaching kids and making a lasting healthy impact are not willing to stay, we should worry. This is not something to dismiss.

And it bothers me that when teacher concerns are brought forward, I’ve heard people respond with statements like “Good Riddance,” “It could be worse,” or “At least you get the summers off.” This goes back to the idea of abuse that Shane spoke about earlier and even the martyrdom that Jennie talks about. When teachers speak out about the stress, burn out, or even threats and intimidation, it seems like they shouldn’t complain because it could be worse. Just because I’m not dead doesn’t mean a knife in the thigh is any better – just ask Portia.

And if you didn’t get that last reference to Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Julius Caesar, that’s okay, We’re not here for great Shakespeare jokes, we’re here because Wacker, the teacher from the start of this episode and a man who would have chuckled and spit water out about that really lame joke, quit teaching. And he’s adamant about saying that he quit – he took it very personally.

Jaye Wacker taught for a total of 31 years, 29 in one district, and he quit 2 months before he could retire. Wacker loved, and I mean LOVED teaching – especially when he felt like he had freedom in his classroom. Freedom to listen to stories from other students or to create lessons that he knew were effective.

Wacker: When you're not limited, you can teach. When you're not limited, you can push kids to reach a potential. There's things about what drove me out - limits. We had the best book room, and part of it came from IB. But we had an absolutely unbelievable book room. And little by little, we lost books.

Wacker pointed to a few examples where books were removed from classes and the book room. The book that hurt the most was Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Toni Morrison is one of 3 Americans to have won the Nobel prize for literature. She is the only woman and the only person of color of those 3 winners. And, she is the only one of the three to have had her book removed from Wacker’s shelves.

And I'm incredibly bitter because kids desperately need The Bluest Eye. Yeah, it's a tough book. It has really tough content. And guess what, these are important issues in our contemporary society. And so we address them, we face them. And so it was just little by little, our, I hesitate to say freedoms, but in some ways, not freedom, the breadth of what we could teach became more and more limited. And that restriction, I guess, I've always chafed against restrictions like that. And I just hated that.

On top of the restrictions of books were the restrictions set in place by standardized inspired curriculum or the tests associated with that curriculum, which started to take precedence over things that Wacker knew allowed for engaging and authentic learning.

Wacker was working on sentence modeling with his students. It was an effective approach from a pivotal figure in grammar instruction named Constance Weaver - not a standardized assessment company .

And suddenly, we were having these incredibly complex, beautiful sentences. And so then, when I have these students that are creating these things that…friggin art. I took what Weaver had, and then I Wackered it and ran with that. And what I was seeing out of that was amazing. And none of it worked on the GVC. I was teaching students to write brilliantly, and it wasn't going to work on the GVC. It was so frustrating because I think the sentences were the building block of thinking, not of writing, of thinking. And so then when they had those tools, and then that thinking and writing…everything exploded from there, but I dropped it because it didn't work on the GVC.

And then Wacker narrated this:

He motioned to shooting himself in the chin.

Wacker said this in jest, but the threat of suicide is present for teachers and it came up again and again in interviews. Several teachers mentioned having suicidal ideation when they woke up or when they were sitting in their cars before going into school. Many said they had to go to therapy or be placed on anti-depressants. This was also serious for Wacker and his wife Jenny - we both married a Jennie. He pointed to a spot just outside of his dining room, right behind where I was sitting, near a lazy boy recliner and the glass door entrance to his house before he said,

Wacker: And I was standing right there when I told Jenny that, and I confessed that I was ready to kill myself. Because there's no way out. We need the salary. But I hate myself, and I hate what I'm doing. And I think that's when she took very seriously I needed to do something different. And she was a motivating force because I lacked the confidence in myself to believe I can do something different. But my identity was being a teacher. My whole sense of self was being a teacher, even more so than being a dad. And I suddenly was a complete and utter failure at who I thought I was, and you talk about crashing. Jeez-Oh. Tthat was a that was a rough night.

Wacker is a good friend of mine. Hearing this breaks my heart. It’s important to ask why teachers get to this point, and it’s important to listen. For many, it had to do with not feeling valued or feeling smart in their roles. For Wacker, it had to do with what was lost over the years of teaching – over the shifts in policy and resources and ability to make an impact. When teaching is associated with terms like a calling or a vocation, it isn’t a surprise that people attach their identity with the work. And separating from the work can be devastating.

Wacker: I left because I wasn't making a difference anymore.

My last year in the classroom, I did a worksheet packet for To Kill a Mockingbird. And I've yet to forgive myself. I was trying to find something in there, because this is what people do. They do these things. So it must be good teaching. And little by little, those packets just started sitting on the back window sill because I just couldn't bring myself to face them. They were the sort of thing I hated. But then I couldn't seem to address these other things that needed to be on these tests. And I just felt like a failure. I just I felt like a failure. I wasn't keeping up. I wasn't exciting. I wasn't…it just I wasn't turning kids on to English. I felt if anything, I was turning them off. So it's time to do something different.

I literally was becoming the teacher I despised. I hate myself for that. But I needed a job. I've had to come to grips with the fact that I love teaching. And by the time I quit, I didn't love myself as a teacher. Again, look in the mirror. I became what I didn't like, what I despised. I became that to a certain degree. And that that hurts.

I used to think ideally, my ideal retirement would be teach half time, where I could still get that fix of working with kids and literature and writing. I never thought I'd quit early.

When thinking about why teachers are leaving Wacker puts it simply – Teachers teach for the love of it, and many teachers are leaving because they don’t love it anymore.

Wacker: And it’s got to be love of kids first. For me with English, then its love of literature and writing, second. It's not love of curriculum. It's not love of administration. It's not love of standardized tests, it’s not love of the almighty ACT. It’s the love of learning and making a difference.

But the love of learning and making a difference are hard to measure. Almost every teacher I spoke with, and even folks I still work with, know that we’re teachers because of the kids. We love the kids – they’re usually the best part of the job. It’s the other stuff that weighs teachers down, that impacts their mental health, their willingness to fight rather than flee or become apathetic.

Note that Wacker said teachers teach for the love of it. Pay matters, without a doubt, but Wacker knew the pay wasn’t his priority when he started teaching.

My cooperating teacher, Jeff Fong, the very first at the end of September. I'll never forget, because we went into the teachers lounge and his paycheck was in his mailbox. And he said, if you learn one thing, learn this. When you look at this check, the word that should come out of your mouth is suckers. Because I’d do it for free. The day you look at the check, and you say, it's not enough, it's time to go.

The negativity that Wacker expresses is present across education, and as his co-teacher said, for many folks, that paycheck just isn’t enough anymore.

Wacker said that teaching is the best profession when the conditions are right, but they weren’t for him anymore. So after 3 decades, Wacker quit teaching. He has spent the last year working with the Wyoming Department of Administration and Information.

Before we finished the night with pizza and watching a tv show with his wife and daughter, Wacker left me with this as a final thought.

We gotta change things. We got to fix this. This is insane. This is utterly insane.

And I agree. Things need to change. They need to change in order to keep teachers, and they need to change in order to ensure that we have the best education we can have for students. What Jennie, Shane, and Wacker talk about isn’t unique to our school, district, or state. These are the same concerns teachers across the country are having, and like Wacker said, We gotta fix this.

But to figure out where we need to go in education, we need to remember where we’ve been (from the good to the bad) and why a system to educate the public was built in the first place.

That will be next time on Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore. Thank you for listening. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast 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 Cody Fournier. Our theme song is by Julian Saporiti. All other music can be found on our website – create and name website. A special thanks to Jennica Fournier, Shane Atkinson, and Jaye Wacker for being inspiring teachers and taking time to sit down and chat with me. This podcast is funded in part by the Fund for Teachers Fellowship.