Another example of the limits of good intentions, and the very real hurdles new teachers face in driving student achievement in our toughest schools. Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks writes about Ed Morman, a mid-career switcher who entered the Baltimore City Teaching Residency, but is now admitting defeat and quitting the field.
“The [teaching] job was the hardest I’ve had, by far,” Morman wrote, “but the potential for job satisfaction was far greater than I’d ever felt before. I told the kids that I quit teaching because I needed to make more money. This isn’t true. … I quit because of the stress I felt. The main cause of the stress was the kids themselves. I could never rise above the feeling of humiliation that I felt each day when I tried to address 20 or 25 kids and might find none of them paying attention to me. I seethed when I asked a student to stop talking and heard the response, ‘Get out of my face.’ So often I stood in the classroom wishing I could be anywhere else.
“I try to get a class to come to order while one kid is jumping on a second, a third calls out my name asking me for a pencil, a fourth demands that I let her go to the bathroom and a fifth needs to go see Miss Smith, while a sixth needs a pass to the nurse’s office and a seventh starts making silly, repetitive noises. … One day a cheap calculator hit the wall just above my head. Another day, it was a Jell-O cup, whose contents dripped down the wall and stained the picture of Harriet Tubman I had hanging on a bulletin board. …I had a meltdown after seeing how poorly my kids did on a standardized test.
Typically Morman shoulders the blame himself for his failure. “One thing I absorbed from my otherwise inadequate training is that it was up to me to make a difference,” he notes. “And I did make a difference, but not enough to sustain me through the nonsense.”
A sad, achingly familiar tale.
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