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Educator Issues: Teaching - Job, or a Commitment to be Surrogate Parent?

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Teaching - Job, or a Commitment to be Surrogate Parent?

Today's educators recognize that their role has vastly increased from the traditional responsibility of providing academic instruction. For any who have seen the inspirational teaching films, Stand and Deliver, Dangerous Minds, and the new release, Freedom Writers, those incredible educators clearly made the difference in their students by investing their whole hearts into the students.
While families typically serve the function of nurturing children (Maslow's Heirarchy - Safety, Love, Sense of Belonging, etc), broken families lack these crucial components. The most effective teachers, therefore, attempt to meet these needs. Sometimes this can have negative impact on the teacher. In the Freedom Writers film, the teacher lost her husband primarily because of her commitment to her students. It could be argued that her commitment to students was a greater purpose than that to her husband because students outweigh the sole spouse and they were younger, therefore had greater potential to change lives (ripple effect).
It is frightening that teachers are more and more looked upon to fulfill family functions.
As a husband and father to 3 children of my own, it has become more and more difficult for me to provide the same degree of commitment to my students while maintaining my role as family man. This struggle, beyond any difficulties with behavior and school requirements, has caused me to question whether or not I will remain in education as a teacher. Is teaching just a job, or is it a full heart-level commitment? If it is more than a job, more of a family level calling, is it possible to continue in it for 20+ years until one achieves retirement? I think this is part of the reason that teacher burn-out is so common. Youthful, energetic teachers do it with a great degree of commitment and soon discover that it requires much more than a 9am to 5pm job for less pay, so they leave. No blame. Complete understanding. Even those phenomenal teachers we watch movies about seem to move on to different positions after those initial triumphant experiences. The frightening observation I've made is that this dilemma appears to be on the rise.

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