The stress of teaching is often blamed on rowdy students and unrealistic expectations from school officials. But new research suggests that parents may be the real culprit in teacher burnout.
The study, published this month in the psychology journal Anxiety, Stress, & Coping, surveyed 118 German schoolteachers who had been teaching for an average of 20 years. The questionnaires were designed to assess personality traits like perfectionism. They also measured the teachers’ level of burnout and their reactions to pressure from colleagues, students and parents. Although “burnout” is complex and different for every teacher, it’s usually defined as occurring when a teacher feels emotionally exhausted at the end of the day, appears cynical or uncaring about what happens to students and feels as if he or she has reached few personal goals.
Although perfectionism is often linked with job stress, teachers with perfectionist tendencies in this survey weren’t more likely to have burnout. But teachers who felt pressure to be perfect or experienced criticism for being imperfect were more likely to have burnout. Notably, the highest pressure to be perfect didn’t come from students or colleagues but from parents.
Not surprised. Everybody thinks they can teach better than teachers. Parents don’t particularly value them. It is a general reflection of the culture…
I guess I fall into the category John (#1) describes: as someone who thinks he can teach better than teachers. I have little sympathy, and not much more respect, for teachers. I recognize that I am writing from my own experiences, and that others may, and probably have had, different experiences with [b]public school[/b] teachers and administrators. Yet, my experiences have been so painful that I most times cannot help but lump the good and the bad together.
My attitude is based on many [b]very[/b] negative encounters with teachers (and administrators) as we attempted to find the right learning situation for my son who has some learning disabilities. Overall, we found these teachers and administrators to be exceptionally lazy and very defensive; there were plenty of words about complying with the IEP, and plenty of excuses as to why they had not; they continually scheduled, missed, and rescheduled meetings. After a year of such fruitless activities, we had enough of the “help” the public school system was willing to provide.
Four years ago my wife (who has a BS in elementary education with a minor is special education) and I (BA English, minor in Latin; MLIS) made the decision to home school our two younger children (now ages 11 & 13). My wife is the main educator, and I teach Latin and read essays, etc. While the costs of running a home school are tremendous (on one income), the effort has been most rewarding, and we have had the freedom to introduce religious training into our curriculum, to control better the cultural influences to which our children are subjected, to adjust our schedule to participate in volunteer opportunities or some special educational opportunity, to continue a cohesive curriculum year-round, and most importantly, to truly know how our children are doing in school.
I think the NEA and AFT have played a role in this – protecting teachers regardless of their competency. And the defecient teachers are the very ones likely to scapegoat the parents (who of course are not entirely blameless either).
My sister has taught at secondary schools in suburbs of Vancouver, BC, for decades and, based on her experience, the article seems to have omitted another major player: school administration. She has tons of horror stories of teachers who want to discipline persistently disruptive and disrespectful students, but get no support from principals and other officials who back down at the first sign of resistance from parents.
Under such conditions, maintaining discipline in the classroom, so that students who want to learn can do so, becomes a constant and often hopeless battle.
My sister has contempt for some of the spineless principals she has worked under. By persevering and manoeuvering, she has managed to settle at a school with reasonably supportive administration. Even so, she can’t wait to retire. Other dedicated teachers, needless to say, have long since changed careers.
January 2 is usually a slow news day, and this appears to be a slow news day article. Essentially, data show that teachers doing the same thing for 20 years experience “burnout.” I imagine that this same unremarkable fact can be reported about long-time workers in any professional field. Moreover, teachers feel pressure to excel from the customers of their educational services, i.e., the students’ parents (in the United States parents are still deemed to have legal control over their children–at least for now). I guess this is an interesting, newsworthy fact, but only because public school teachers have a monopoly and virtually guaranteed job security, and therefore should feel no pressure from their customers. I guess it is good that some are feeling stressed as this will compel them to leave. I am sorry, but any teacher who resents or gets burned out over pressure from kids’ parents to succeed ought to find another line of work.
I know more than one former teacher who quit because the amount of work required is in no way commensurate with the pittance grudgingly eked out by the local school district. A teacher who is trying to teach well will often work 60+ hours a week; and at some point — perhaps after the three-hundredth parent has yelled at them for not recognizing that their little darling is a misunderstood genius — they’re going to start pondering that they could work less and get paid more in some other job. The ones who stay are the rare individuals who love the job so much that they’ll put up with any amount of abuse, and the ones who really couldn’t get hired anywhere else if they tried.
If you want to get and keep a cadre of good teachers in the schools, you either have to make the job attractive enough that they’ll put up with low wages or you have to pay them enough to put up with the negative aspects of the job.
I have a masters degree in education. After a year of working as a substitute teacher, I was threatened more than once, broke up a few fights while other teachers stood around and watched (afraid of being sued) and students who didn’t like my ‘strict’ style filed false reports to the school board. I had enough of that. That is when I decided to go back to school and earn my Masters of Library and Information Studies. I have not regretted leaving before I started.
Teacher burnout is a reality today. So is student burnout and parent burnout. The expectations on today’s students is overwhelming. All-day kindergarten, research papers in elementary school, college courses in high school, accelerated everything…We
keep pushing and pushing and on what basis? Who decided that 5-year-olds can handle a full day of school and then have homework assigned to them? Who decided that a child’s brain has developed appropriately to tackle freshman algebra in 6th or 7th grade? Who decided that a full day of classes (often with no downtime…Study halls are considered a waste of time) can handle 3,4 or 5 hours of homework a night? Who decided that test scores of American students should rival their Chinese counterparts where the adolescent suicide rate in the highest in the world? What are we doing to our kids, our families, our teachers? What are we doing??
What are we doing? We are depriving our children the right to a childhood. If some young’un decided to sail on a raft down the Mississippi today, his parents would be charged with neglect, and he’d be shipped off to a foster home, and his adult friend along for the ride would be thrown into prison.
I heartily suggest the book [url=http://www.amazon.com/Dangerous-Book-Boys-Conn-Iggulden/dp/0061243582/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1199391463&sr=8-1]”the Dangerous book for boys”[/url] by Conn and Hal Iggulden.