Response to bell hooks, Teaching Community, ch. 2. "Time Out"

As someone who has only just begun to think in earnest about teaching high school and who would love to begin TOMORROW, it is hard to imagine a time when I will be feeling worn out by it. But, I have experienced low points in my college teaching career too, and know that unfortunately, some burn out teaching high school might be inevitable. Given this, I suppose it is what one DOES with those feelings of burn out that matter the most. Most of us will not have the ability to take time off, or have what they have as tenured profs, a sabbatical. But we will have every summer, and I can imagine that those summer times will be need to be sacred, no-stressors, in order to regroup and rejuvenate and ready oneself for the year ahead.

bell hooks writes about burn out. She was so burnt out that she took a 2-year unpaid leave of absence from her tenured professorship, and then at the end of it, resigned. This is how she knew she was burnt out:

"The classroom is one of the most dynamic work settings precisely because we are given such a short amount of time to do so much. To perform with excellence and grace teachers must be totally present in the moment, totally concentrated and focused. When we are not fully present, when our minds are elsewhere, our teaching is diminished. I knew it was time for me to take a break from the classroom when my mind was always someplace else. And in the last stages of burnout, I knew I needed to be someplace else because I just simply did not want to get up, get dressed, and go to work. I dreaded the classroom. the most negative consequence of this type of burnout is manifest when teachers begin to abhor and hate students. This happens."

Now, this is a woman teacher scholar writing who has taught for twenty years, and whose very specialty is teaching itself. What worries me is that if bell hooks can suffer such burn out, then we all certainly can. None of us are (or will be) such amazing teachers that we are exempt. Why? Because like parenthood, teaching is one of the toughest jobs on earth. It's a vocation for many. bell hooks quotes a writer whom I intent to look into further, named Parker Palmer, and his book The Courage to Teach. Palmer writes:

"As good teachers weave the fabric that joins them with students and subjects, the heart is the loom on which the threads are tried, the tension is held, the shuttle flies, and the fabric is stretched tight. small wonder, then, that teaching tugs at the heart, opens the heart, even breaks the heart--and the more one loves teaching, the more heartbreaking it can be. The courage to teach is the courage to keep one's heart open in those very moments when the heart is asked to hold more than it is able so that teacher and students and subject can be woven into the fabric of community that learning, and living require."

As I spend more time in the MAT classroom, more time reading about pedagogy, thinking about hands-on aspects like classroom management and more abstract aspects like equality in the classroom, and I imagine myself as a high school teacher come fall of '10, I am constantly reminded that teaching is emotionally and intellectually consuming work. And that is what makes it meaningful to me. Teaching really matters. But it will not be an easy road, or a restful one!