The Core Knowledge Blog

Teacher blogger TMAO’s surprise announcement last week that he was resigning from his school was the edublog equivalent of LBJ announcing he would not run for re-election. Today he posts the reasons that were NOT behind his unexpected departure.

It’s not that he wasn’t prepared, successful, supported or paid. TMAO is basically burned out, conceding “I’m not happy unless I’m being the teacher I see in my head, but the process of finding that guy and living as him no longer makes me happy.”

Having been in TMAO’s shoes less than a year ago, I’ll say what I said then and many times since. Teaching in a struggling school is the easiest job in the world to do badly—but the hardest job in the world to do well. Setting high standards is something you do not just for students but for yourself. It’s not (and this, frankly, is something too many people who’ve never been in classroom will never quite get at a visceral level) about test scores or data. It’s so easy to take that first step down the path of least resistance. No one knows but you. Some make peace with it. Others — and it sounds like TMAO is one of them — simply can’t abide not “being the teacher I see in my head.”

This inevitable inability of even the most earnest, energetic young teachers to keep it up for more than a few years portends many things for education reform. None of them good.

Update: Corey Bunje Bower, a consistently thoughtful ex-teacher blogging at Thoughts on Education Policy weighs in candidly on the TMAO story and his own reasons for quitting.