Question

I'm feeling particularly inspired today from a conversation that I've had often in the last month. A caring experienced teacher asks me how I'm doing. I mention that there are definitely little moments that I love, but I'm also pretty exhausted. They offer encouragement, and then they often tell the same story: it seems that most experienced teachers have learned along the way that "you just can't be the super-awesome-always-engaging teacher that you dreamed of being". You have to be realistic about the time you have. "You can't do everything", as the common phrase goes.

The frequency of this conversation got me thinking. Why do we chose this reality for educators?  Of course, in any situation, there will always be "more" and "better", but doesn't it seem a bit silly that we take enthusiastic capable new teachers, who are bursting with new ideas and high goals, and teach them to significantly lower their expectations of themselves?

I was watching the girls basketball team play on Thursday night, and they had clearly honed their skills (they won the game by a long shot, literally). But it wasn't simple case of more training that made them so successful (taking that equation to it's limits, training 24 hours a day would leave the girls to exhausted to play). It was about training well. Something that the girls, with the help of their coaches, have clearly done.

Can we do that with teaching? How do we train well as we're learning to teach instead of just training more? And how do we figure out how to train well, when the treadmill is running at level 20 and we're on it?

I was inspired by this repeat conversation because it suggests that this is a real systemic question that many of us haven't found an answer to yet.  It's also a really important question to me, to almost every teacher I've talked with, and to society who have so much invested in education and therefore in educators.

It occurred to me that I could spend a lot of time trying to figure out this question. Which made me wonder if I should look into education rather than physics education research possibilities for the future. Admittedly, there might be a little bit of a narcissistic pattern here: last year, I was a girl in physics and I researched girls in physics. When I was a physics tutorial TA, I researched physics tutorial TAs. Now I'm a first year teacher, and I'm feeling quite inspired to research first year teachers. The only way to really resolve this pattern is to research narcissistic researchers, but for now, I think I'll go for learning as much as I can as a first year teacher.