The Morale Of A Service Teacher

The twenty-five stories that are contained in the book, My First Year As A Teacher, are about real teachers and their experiences during the first year of teaching. Each story is different. Some are about memorable students while other stories are about some of the hardships that are encountered as a novice teacher. The diverse sampling of stories in this book gives insight of what kind of problems one might encounter as a teacher, yet they also describe how rewarding the profession can be. I found it rather difficult to choose only ten stories as my favorite but after much consideration and rereading I decided on the following stories because in many ways I could relate to the students as well as the teachers that are given life in these stories.

Fifty percent of new teachers quit with in the first five years of teaching (NEA, 2015), with this number being so alarmingly high it begs the questions: Why do so many teachers leave after going through years of college for this profession? Were teachers not prepared for the job, through college training, what should colleges teach in order to better prepare teachers?

Teachers today face a number of challenges that contribute to a lack of job satisfaction, leaving schools for other professions that are more lucrative, low comparative compensation, and poor working conditions:

Like leadership turnover in other professions, turnover rates at more challenging schools are on the higher end of that spectrum (Beteille, Kalogrides and Loeb 2011, Boyd, et al. 2008, Clark, Martorell and Rockoff 2009). For instance, large, urban districts have similar turnover rates: Miami-Dade County Public Schools (MDCPS) is 22%, Milwaukee is 20%, San Francisco 26%, and New York City is 24% (Beteille, Kalogrides and Loeb 2011, Boyd, et al. 2008, Clark, Martorell and Rockoff 2009). However, within MDCPS, the turnover rate is higher for the district’s highest-poverty schools (28%), versus lowest-poverty schools (18%) (Beteille, Kalogrides and Loeb 2011). New York City school findings were similar (Clark, Martorell and Rockoff 2009). Low-performing, low-SES schools that lose an effective principal, often struggle due to having a replacement that is less-experienced and less-effective (Beteille, Kalogrides and Loeb 2011, Branch, Hanushek and Rivkin 2012).

I can totally relate to Casey’s discussion, “When Teachers Lose Heart”. As a veteran teacher I have witnessed and felt the way in which Laurie Barnoski describes in the article reviewed. There are so many different issues in which teachers feel stressed about presently in school systems. This stress leads to teacher burn out and eventually to teachers wanting to leave the occupation in which they have trained and received degrees in. I personally started teaching in 2001 and feel like the fun and creativeness that teachers once had has slowly been stripped away. There are too many state and national policies we are trying to keep up with. High stakes testing has taken control and teachers feel threatened of their jobs in many ways. Rigorous

According to the Maryland Teaching Staffing Report, the annual attrition percentage continues to decrease, going from 13.3 percent in 2010-2011 to 11.1 percent in 2012-2013 and 9.3 percent in 2013-2014. Although the total attrition percentage is improving, PGCPS continues to have the greatest percentage of attrition compared to neighboring districts as well as the greatest number of teachers that exit the district with less than one to five years of experience. These data confirm that teacher retention is a major problem that significantly impacts PGCPS. These data also support Ingersoll (2003) and Perda (2013) studies regarding the significant number of teachers that leave the profession within their first five years of teaching.

There are many contributing factors to low teacher turnover, however, the main issue is a lack of support and respect for our teachers. Instead of working on maintaining and providing support for our current educators, the conversation usually surrounds expensive and often ineffective recruitment programs. The harsh fact is that it is very expensive to live in our valley and the current teacher salary/benefits are not enough to attract top talent. We need to have a serious conversation with our teachers in order to learn what incentives they need to be successful in their roles as well as to maintain a comfortable living. Teachers are the one profession that truly molds the future of our

Most parents want their children to have a better educational experience than they received including having a memorable teacher. You remember that one teacher who made history come alive or provided real life examples for the use the Pythagorean Theorem. Maybe your special teacher made grammar meaningful as you expressed our ideas through writing. Imagine if your favorite teacher poured their wealth of experience, knowledge, and magical know how into one of your child’s teachers. However all this educational wisdom becomes like a vapor as teachers relocate or retire which has becomes a reoccurring event in the Arizona public schools. According to the Arizona Department of Education 35.3% of classroom teacher left their teaching position

In Charlotte, it was reported that 1000 teachers resigned from North Carolina schools. This massive number of teachers leavings schools in one city has many negative effects, but the real issue is why are these teachers leaving and how can it be fixed? So what needs to be done? Everyday educators in North Carolina weigh the pros and cons of their jobs and ask themselves ‘is this little to no pay worth working as an educator?’ or ‘are these large classes of students able to acquire the proper learning?’. Being ranked the second worst state for educators to pursue a career in has put North Carolina in a tight spot. What can be done to get North Carolina’s education system

Many have voiced their concerns over the many issues within the teaching profession. Heather Voke of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum responds to one issue, the teacher shortage, by researching the nature of the shortage, its probable causes, problems resulting from the shortage, and frequently recommended policy changes. According to Voke (2003), 42 percent of all teachers leaving depart for lack of job satisfaction, to pursue another career, or better career opportunities. Low salaries and lack of public respect also impacts teacher retention. Policy recommendations to retain teachers include: salary increases, high quality induction programs, prohibit out-of-field teaching, include teachers in decision making, developing current teachers, collaboration with universities to attract and train teachers, and reduce class size. Voke suggests that policy makers and educational leaders do not understand the nature of the teacher shortage. Moreover, developing programs to attract candidates and not properly train them risks wasting valuable resources.

The purpose of exploring this phenomenon of teachers leaving their profession early in their career is to determine why it is happening and how it can be prevented in the future.

A common challenge for public education is the loss of new teachers during their first years as educators (Nelson, Duke, Hutchens, & Machell, 2014). Rural school systems have often battled with attracting and retaining teachers’ due to factors such as environment, resistance to change, student performance and administration (Goodpaster, Omolola, & Weaver, 2012). Other research has shown that urban school districts have a higher proportion of under-prepared teachers and have a need for retaining and recruiting qualified teachers (Nelson, Duke, Hutchens, & Machell, 2014). Addressing teacher attrition is important to decreasing the country’s ongoing teacher shortage crisis (Carver-Thomas & Hammond, 2017).

In conclusion, a teacher is not a force to be reckoned with and only the bravest of people would deal with such a force; these people must be prepared to live a life free of happiness and full of depression. They must put up with the constant mood swings of an educator and learn to live an old fashioned life. Most people are not brave and are reluctant, is the reason most teachers are

Teacher burnout emerged as an important concept in the 1970s, and it captured something very critical about people’s experience with teaching. It was first defined by Freudenberg in 1974, and it symbolizes feelings of failure and being worn, resulting from an overload of

When I think about teachers that I have had in the past, several different ones come to my mind. Each of these educators stands out in my mind for a variety of diverse reasons. Whether it is their sense of humor, their tactfulness, their love of the subject matter, their fanatical and sporadic behavior, or their yearning to be childish themselves, I can still remember at least one quality of every teacher I have ever encountered. Every one of these teachers conveyed subject material to their students just as they were educated and employed to do. However, I trust that every professional in the world has an abundance of opportunity for improvement; teachers could discover and improve themselves merely by having