Alexandra Robbins - The Teachers: A Year Inside Americas Most Vulnerable, Important Profession

A LSO BY A LEXANDRA R OBBINS

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Copyright 2023 by Alexandra Robbins

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Robbins, Alexandra, 1976 author.

Title: The teachers: a year inside Americas most vulnerable, important profession / Alexandra Robbins.

Description: First Edition. | New York: Dutton, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022042500 | ISBN 9781101986752 (Hardcover) | ISBN 9781101986769 (eBook)

Subjects: LCSH: TeachersUnited StatesCase studies. | TeachersUnited StatesInterviews. | TeachingUnited StatesCase studies. | TeachingVocational guidanceUnited States.

Classification: LCC LB1775.2 .R63 2023 | DDC 371.100973dc23/eng/20221125

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042500

Cover design by Steve Meditz

Cover image of classroom by Maskot Images / Shutterstock Images

Adapted for ebook by Molly Jeszke

Some identifying details, including teachers, parents, and students names, have been changed or omitted to protect individuals privacy. In some instances, events are not in chronological order or occurred in a month other than that of the chapter heading, and dialogue is approximated to match the authors or interviewees best recollections of those exchanges.

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To my family, past and present, with unconditional love
and
to the educators who taught me,
the coworkers who supported me,
and the teachers who inspired me

CONTENTS

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Prologue

You may think you know whats inside, but you dont.

You see the boxy buildings, brick or concreteflanked by lush green athletic fields, a primary-colored playground, or a crumbling blacktop spiked with rusted basketball hoopsin front of which yellow buses groan exhaustive sighs before depositing or collecting lines of chattering bag-backed students.

Look deeper.

Long locker-lined corridors or tiled halls studded with bulletin boards, smelling of poster paint, cleaning products, or perhaps faintly of feet funnel children into classrooms at the trill of the bell.

Teenagers watch raptly as their science teacher demonstrates her favorite experiment.

An unflappable paraeducator expertly soothes an elementary school student behind the cubbies so the rest of the class can continue learning undisrupted.

Look deeper.

A school librarian is teaching technology, teaching an information literacy class, teaching animation, teaching other teachers.

The gymnasium echoes the classs boisterous cheers as the PE teachers fists rise in triumph when the child on the spectrum sinks his first basket.

A student is struck by the magical pierce of recognition and relief the moment they are introduced to a book featuring a character who is a lot like them.

A teacher giddily hightails it back to her classroom after orchestrating a prank on a coworker to brighten his day.

Look deeper still.

Marginalized students gather, finding acceptance, solace, and camaraderie during lunchtime in the library.

A teacher spends her planning period, then her lunchtime, subbing unpaid for a coworkers classfor the third time in a week.

A parent spews obscenities at staff members in a windowless conference room.

Teachers congregate in the lounge to console a colleague who has just found out that her father passed away.

A music teacher gives his student the gloves off his hands for the wintry walk home.

A math teacher stays after school to provide extra support to a student before rushing home to her own ailing immunocompromised child.

A kindergarten teacher meticulously creates sight word cards, laminating them with a machine she personally purchased to teach a certain child to read when others could not.

English teachers grade essays, painstakingly refining adolescents writing, long after the sun has dipped below the treetops, in classrooms where the only sounds are the thwonks from the clunky, broken HVAC and the hum of outdated fluorescent lights.

A veteran history teacher with a masters degree calls a blood donation center, desperate to pay the bills because her teaching salary and part-time second job arent enough to live on.

You may think you know what lies beneath a schools faade, how to interpret the bustle, where the systems gone wrong. But unless youre an educator, you dont.

Look deeper, here, and learn.

The truth is that you dont know what its really like to be a teacherthe inspiration and frustration, the humor, the tears, the joysunless youve stepped into their shoes. In this book, teachers invite you to do just that. As a journalist who has written several books about students and education, even I was surprised by what teachers shared.

To get an uncensored, no-holds-barred look at their lives, I followed three teachers stories over the course of a school year. Youll meet Penny, a southern middle school math teacher, who grappled with a toxic culture at the big school in a small town; Miguel, a special ed teacher in the western United States, who fought for his students as both educator and activist; and Rebecca, an East Coast 4th grade teacher, who struggled to schedule and define a life outside of school. I also interviewed hundreds of other teachers, many of whose voices appear in the essays that anchor each chapter.

Let these teachers take you behind the scenes to join their classrooms; watch parent-teacher conferences, staff meetings, and student behavioral meetings; eavesdrop in the staff lounge and teacher happy hour; take a field trip; witness teacher pranks. Learn teachers secret codes and strategies and what they think about parents, ride along with the highs, feel the weight of the pressures, lose your heart to the kids.

While this book does address COVID-19s effects on teachers, particularly in chapter 4, I have chosen not to focus extensively on COVID because the pandemic did not cause the underlying problems in U.S. school systemsit simply exacerbated them, laying them bare for all to seeand to suggest otherwise would be a disservice to the teaching profession. Teachers working conditions had deteriorated before the pandemic and wont resolve unless decision-makers commit to making sweeping long-term changes. Other countries treat teachers like doctors and lawyers: true experts of their subject and craft, a Pennsylvania AP English teacher said. In the U.S., they say things like Those who cant, teach. After the teachers in this book escort you through their year-in-the-life stories, our hope is that youll never tolerate that message, or anything like it, again.