Warning Bell is a new newsletter focused on the incredible stresses and strains being put on the teaching profession, and on teachers themselves. My name is Stephen Noonoo—I’m a longtime education journalist and editor for Edutopia, EdSurge, THE Journal and elsewhere.
If you like this post, please subscribe and recommend this newsletter to others. Thoughts? Suggestions? Reply to this email to reach me. And if you’re a teacher or former teacher with a story to share, I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for reading!
Welcome to Warning Bell, a new newsletter on the teaching profession, and on teachers themselves, which will attempt to catalogue just how difficult being an educator has become.
Why start this newsletter? Well, I grew up in a household where education was important. My mom wasn’t just a teacher, she was my teacher for 3 years in high school, where she taught authentic science research (a topic she reflected on in an essay a few years ago). Many of the close family friends I grew up around were teachers, and I never needed to be reminded to treat them with respect (OK, maybe in middle school).
Which is why when we started hearing from teachers and running hugely popular stories at EdSurge on burnout, demoralization and the importance of mindfulness strategies to simply stay afloat, I started paying attention. After all, it wasn’t always the case that a quarter of all teachers experienced symptoms of depression—or that three-quarters of them experienced frequent job-related stress (compared with just a third of other working adults). Any reasonable person would rightly see that as a symptom of a broken system and a cry for help.
Last year, as part of a 6 month project, I spoke with more than a dozen former teachers who had recently left the classroom for a longform story that ran in The New Republic. The teachers I spoke with told me about a mental health crisis engulfing their profession that was receiving far too little attention. They talked of panic attacks, sleepless nights, depression, anxiety and desperation. They shared harrowing details about their internalized guilt, but also about schools and systems that didn’t value them as professionals, or even people. There were culture war attacks, tone-deaf requests from administrators, nonsensical post-COVID policies and never-ending workdays that sapped their enthusiasm and eventually their ability to do the job they were trained to do. One teacher, whose story I ultimately didn’t end up writing about, called me frequently whenever she remembered a fresh horror story. In that light, the growing teacher shortage makes a lot more sense.
This is not normal, and it’s certainly not fair to teachers. The political climate has become increasingly anti-teacher as the classroom gets dragged ever deeper into the culture war morass. Thanks to reactionary new laws and policies, which vary by state, teachers now get in trouble for some of the dumbest things imaginable, even as they endure stagnant pay and surging workloads.
Recently, a trio of education researchers wrote in Education Week about the popular media narrative that “equates good teaching with sacrificial teaching.” Teachers told these researchers about the many sacrifices they made for their jobs—everything from their time and money to their sleep and personal relationships. That too is unfair. Elsewhere, a teacher friend of mine has written eloquently on the collective trauma endured by teachers and students over the past few years, and of the need to flock together—and to resist.
It’s my intention for this newsletter to talk openly and honestly about these issues, mixing news, commentary, essays and original journalism as part of an effort to catalogue the real experience of today’s teaching profession.
I’ll leave you with one final thought. Over the years, I’ve observed many, many teachers hesitate to complain about the very real problems in their profession as they talk earnestly about loving their students and wanting to love their jobs. It’s an unfortunate and unconscionable reality that too often their jobs simply do not love them back.