Last week, graduate teachers faced their first group of students. In all likelihood, they'll soon discover that everything they've been told about teaching is true.
It's tough. It can be heartbreaking — if you care. Then again, if you're interested in becoming a good teacher, you would care.
This is a quality that doesn't get spoken about much when governments and unions talk about teacher performance and student achievement. It's certainly not part of Teacher Training 101.
Yet caring is not only embedded in teaching; it also distinguishes educators from technicians. After all, it is not simply an assembly-line job, where you churn and spit out graduates into the workforce and hope for the best. When you're dealing with young people on the threshold of the next stage of their lives, you're also dealing with fragile aspirations, unmet needs, broken connections. The appropriate, imperative response to all that is to care.
This is not airy-fairy stuff. Studies on education consistently tell us that low teacher expectation of students tends to be the killer, not socioeconomic status. So there's something to be said for movies about real-life teachers who turn their recalcitrant class into miracle achievers. It does happen, and it happens when the emotional investment made by a teacher intersects with their students' own desires.
Unfortunately, caring means foregoing immunity from hurt. The movies do not entirely capture the injuries that are inflicted when students reject carefully prepared lessons, or perpetually wag your class, or verbally abuse you when you're trying to reach the heart of their inattention.
There are few other jobs where you get instant, unmediated, personal feedback from your clients. All day, every day. No wonder that, at least in Britain, they have found that stress levels of teachers are similar to those of ambulance workers and police officers.
How else would you explain the numbers? Over the 2004–2005 period, nearly 1500 Victorian teachers and principals left the job. Last year's survey by the Australian Education Union found that 47 per cent of beginning teachers do not see themselves teaching in ten years' time. In fact, based on current trends, many will leave within just five years of starting their career.
But there is another side of this equation. The paradox in caring, especially in professions like teaching, is that the very thing that makes you vulnerable can be a source of strength. Most students respect empathetic teachers even when the relationship is adversarial. In