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April 9, 2019 Instruction & Curriculum

Here’s What the Beginning of Teacher Decline Feels Like

  • About the Author
  • Latest Posts

About Jeremy S. Adams

Jeremy S. Adams is the author of HOLLOWED OUT: A Warning About America's Next Generation (2021) as well as Riding the Wave (2020, Solution Tree), The Secrets of Timeless Teachers (2016, Rowman & Littlefield) & Full Classrooms, Empty Selves (2012, Middleman Books). He is a graduate of Washington & Lee University and teaches Political Science at both Bakersfield High School and California State University, Bakersfield. He is the recipient of numerous teaching and writing honors including the 2014 California Teacher of the Year Award (Daughters of the American Revolution), was named the 2012 Kern County Teacher of the Year, was a semi-finalist in 2013 for the California Department of Education’s Teachers of the Year Program, and was a finalist in 2014 for the prestigious Carlston Family Foundation National Teacher Award. The California State Senate recently sponsored a resolution in recognition of his achievements in education. He is a 2018 CSUB (California State University, Bakersfield) Hall of Fame inductee.
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  • A Message from the Year 2040: How a Year of COVID Learning Forever Changed My Life - November 23, 2020
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  • Teaching in the Midst of the Corona Crisis - March 18, 2020
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Here is something they never taught me in my teacher credential classes two decades ago: how to confront the first signs I am perhaps losing a step in the classroom.

I’m not a hipster in my fashion, not woke in my politics, and certainly not hyperaware of the modern trappings of youth culture.

I don’t understand the humor of their tweets, the witticisms of their memes, or the drollness of their one-liners. Eventually, after voluminous explanation from my students, I finally “get it.” During these moments, I feel like the third-wheel in my own classroom, especially when the students reference YouTube celebrities, famous Instagram posts, or use the latest slang.

I can still make them laugh, but not like I used to. Nowadays, they laugh at my foibles as a father of three managing a boisterous household stable that includes two willful teenage daughters, an outrageous eight-year old son whose temper can be delightfully volcanic, and my wife whose pointed one-liners are the stuff of Hollywood screenwriting legends. (I’m still debating if I should create an anonymous Twitter account with the handle @mywifeshilariousoneliners).

I don’t want to participate in the activities of young staff members. I don’t want to dance at the rallies, act in plays, or chaperone the school dances. When students ask me to come to school events, I usually attend, but often out of obligation.

The principal, who has guided my career for two decades, is retiring this year. Some of my best friends speak often of retirement; even I have started to play with the California State Teacher Retirement calculator from time to time.

I am not sure if my best friends on campus who are my age will be here in five years or ten years or beyond. A lot of them talk of becoming administrators or going to other schools someday. The one person who I thought would always be teaching down the hall from me—my one constant colleague from the beginning of my teacher life—died suddenly last year of cancer. She had just turned forty the month before her death. Teaching hasn’t felt the same since she died to be honest. But everyone else has moved on, so I don’t mention it to anyone anymore.

I used to get upset when students acted disrespectfully towards me, brazenly ditched my class, or displayed the obnoxious persona of the indifferent graduating senior. Now, I just put my head down and accept most of it—why fight? Why verbally joust with seventeen-year-olds whose brains are not even done developing yet? God knows I hope my high school teachers don’t remember me at that age! After all, my students won’t see my disappointment or condemnation as fatherly or ennobling. Frankly, they’ll just think I am being a gigantic jerk. And who wants that? Right? I have decided our parting of the ways in late May is more likely to be positive and affirming if I don’t declare nuclear war on their poor behavior in their final weeks of high school.

I am starting to get a sense that I am woefully out of step with their world-views and preoccupations. I am not an environmentalist, a STEM teacher, or a social justice warrior. They ask me if I like tattoos, and they never really like my answer—in fact, they playfully try to change my mind by giving me every imaginable option. What about a small American flag where no one can see it?

 They get on me for not drinking enough water. When I do drink water in class, I’m told it shouldn’t be from a plastic bottle.

My voice keeps dying by mid-week. My back aches a little every time I drop a pen on the ground, and I bend over to pick it up. If the kids are talking and one student asks me a question, I absolutely have to silence everyone else to hear him or her. I don’t play tennis with the tennis team much anymore. This isn’t geriatric decline, granted, but it surely isn’t youthful spryness, either. I feel more at home on campus when I sound like a cranky fuddy-duddy curmudgeon that an agile avantgarde cosmopolitan.

I am nobody’s favorite anymore. I’m not a new teacher. I’m not edgy. I don’t use cutting edge teaching methods. My ethical inspirations for how to live a good and meaningful life come from prosaic places like Athens, Jerusalem, and Gettysburg. I read books more than I watch Netflix or YouTube videos. I have no interest in places like Coachella. Projections of how to live deeply and true used to be viewed through the prisms of poets, prophets, artists, philosophers, and statesmen. Now, it’s Twitter, and I can’t help but feel that something essential about life is being overlooked, forgotten, or ignored by this development.

But here is the ultimate sign I have lost a step: it’s all OK. No, really, except for wincing when I happen to look at pictures of my youthful teacher self, I always knew the onset of decline had to happen someday. In some ways, getting older in the classroom is a privilege. Some days I feel like I have to work twice as hard to be half the teacher I once was. Or to put it another way, sometimes my current self feels like he is pretending to be my former self.

It’s all very meta and odd and off-putting.

And yet, there is still magic in my day. A lot of magic, actually. I laugh hard almost every single day. I get to teach and discuss genuinely important and fascinating curriculum every single day. My students make me smile a lot more than they make me frown.

I can joyfully admit I had a long time in the sun, teaching at the absolute meridian of my powers. I still throw a lot of strikes, I still have days that brim with significance, I still adore my students, and I still get the sense that deep down they know I passionately believe in them.

As I settle into this third decade of my teaching career, I want to matter as much as I ever have. Maybe that’s just not possible anymore, or maybe I am being overly fatalistic. But I am pretty sure this is what the genesis of decay looks and feels like—like the basketball player who doesn’t dunk anymore, the writer whose sales are in decline, or a singer who used to sell out stadiums and now plays casinos off the strip in Las Vegas.

I can bemoan my altered station, or I can rejoice at the peak I once occupied. Or maybe, just maybe, there is a third option. For despite the fact that there are more teacher years behind me than in front of me, perhaps the best option is not to slowly walk down the mountain, but to find another one and to start climbing anew.

 

 

 

 

 

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Christine Rechner says

    April 09, 2019 at 12:30 pm

    Thank you for sharing. The good thing is that you knew enough of the kids'lingo to make cohesive sense in this article.

    I can empathize when I see the lists of all the things these kids will never have experienced, VCRs, etc.

    I remember making a book for my great grandma's 100th birthday of all the things invented in her lifetime. I learned a lot, like the origin of M&Ms.

    I think it is about joy. I, after only 20 years, have lost the joy. I am moving on. To what, I don't know
    My frriend left at year 27 and does private driver's ed, and loves it.

    You'll know when it is right.

    Reply
  2. Mariana del Rosal says

    April 09, 2019 at 12:54 pm

    You made my day. Thank you for these words! I'm 37 years old, I still feel somehow in my golden teaching years (10 years of experience) but I read you and I thought "well, this is me in 15 more years or so". It doesn't look bad. It doesn't look bad at all. If you teach anything as you write, I'm positive you still leave strong imprints on your students!

    Reply
  3. Ruth E Witty says

    April 09, 2019 at 5:23 pm

    I am 62, I do not feel it is at all necessary to know anything about their favorite music, memes, you tube etc. Those things have nothing to do with math, science or English. The first two will definitely help them to have a good career being a professional youtuber is a stupid aspiration that few will achieve anyway. Anyway they can take it or leave it thank God teachers and paras do not get graded by students as they do in college.

    Reply
  4. Peter says

    April 10, 2019 at 12:44 pm

    I retired last year at the age of 61 after 39 years in the classroom; my experience was much different from yours.

    You avoid all of this by getting out of your bubble and staying engaged with the world rather than hunkering down and insisting that everything that has happened since you were thirty is somehow awful and terrible and not worth keeping up with. You talk to your students as if they are humans, and you give yourself the homework of learning about some of the things that they value. And you open your mind enough to recognize that just because something is not your thing, that doesn't mean it couldn't possibly be anybody's thing. You appreciate the broad range of human experience instead of clutching only to your own.

    It starts with being honest enough to admit that this isn't something you can't do-- it's just something you don't want to do. And lo9ok-- that makes you just like your students, who also resist the pressure to examine and appreciate things outside their own personal experience.

    Reply
  5. Zig says

    April 10, 2019 at 1:20 pm

    Thank you. I taught 37 years and just retired at the end of the last school year. You put into words many of the things I was feeling and thinking but couldn't put my finger on them. I still experienced success, and I still felt I could go on for a few more years; however that feeling of looking in from the outside was growing...mostly with the young teachers who did not look to me as a veteran but as someone to be ignored. So, I retired, passing the torch as it were, moved across the country, started a new adventure, and I am lovingly looking back with no regrets.

    Reply
  6. Jon W. says

    April 10, 2019 at 2:50 pm

    My students are nowhere near as woke about social or environmental issues as yours. All they seem to care about is vile rap music and phone based video games. Their apathy is palpable now. I used to revel in the connection with them. 24 years in, I'm not interested in the connection. Retirement in a year. I am considering long haul trucking as a new career. (not kidding) .

    Reply
  7. Alison K says

    April 10, 2019 at 7:52 pm

    You definitely touched a nerve. I laugh now, saying teaching is a young person’s job and I really believe it is. In this, my 36th year of teaching, I am wanting to step aside and let the young and energetic take over. I do wish that the schools could figure out how to harness the great wealth and experience that comes from a career in the classroom to transition out but still contribute. Anymore, 60 is too young to retire! Thank you for sharing your perspective.

    Reply
  8. Kathy Josephson says

    May 10, 2019 at 2:44 pm

    Climbing a new hill right now. Maybe not a fast as I used to, but still climbing. Thank you, Jeremy. I am sure Michelle felt the same about you. 🙂

    Reply

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