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Why Teachers Don’t Need to Self-Care [1]

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Date: 2022-10-23

Every age is marked by some mania that takes over, and is usually propagated by well-meaning elites, and communicated through some buzz-word. Often, these ideas are badly thought out, taken out of context, and even destructive. The tyranny of buzzwords still reigns. When Education Weekly asked teachers what their least favorite buzzwords were, one of them stu\ck out: self-care.

Teachers gave a number of reasons why they hated this seemingly benign word: one teacher said, “...it implies teacher burnout is the result of something they are doing wrong as individuals and not a systematic problem.” Another educator said, ““‘Self-care.’ As in ‘please do this, that, and the other thing. And remember today’s after-school staff meeting and grades being due tomorrow by 8 a.m. Oh, and don’t forget to be sure to practice ‘self-care’.’” While another teacher thought that, "[Self-care] demands teachers maintain a healthy balance in their lives without addressing pay/added responsibilities/poor conditions & blames them for struggling.”

Underlying the concerns that teachers have is that self-care as a concept ignores the causes for teachers being stressed, anxious, having a poor work-life balance, among other things. It shifts the blame for poor teacher well-being to teachers who are told they can solve all their problems and be happier if they just sat meditatively and breathed. Teachers face a pension crisis , low earnings, and high burnout rates . Conditions are so bad that many states are struggling to attract new teachers, leaving existing teachers facing ever larger classrooms, exacerbating already high burnout. For decades, this steady deterioration in teaching conditions has been ignored.

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has shown that teachers have systematically been paid less, in terms of weekly wages and total compensation, than their non-teacher college-educated peers, and that this pay gap has widened over the last 25 years. Inflation-adjusted average weekly teachers’ wages have been relatively flat since 1996, rising from $1,319 in 1996, to $1,348 in 2021. Meanwhile, non-teacher college educated peers have seen their weekly wages rise from $1,564 in 1996, to $2009 in 2021. Being a teacher means taking a wage penalty, and that penalty rose to its highest level in 2021. Benefits have simply not been good enough to make up for this, with non-teacher college educated workers earning a total compensation 14.2% higher than that of teachers.

Source: EPI

Bloomberg reports that earlier this year, 44% of public schools had teaching vacancies. The teaching crisis is so great that, in rural America, schools have been forced to accept veterans and other non-credentialed workers to teach, and, in some cases, they have been forced to cut the school week to four days. K-12 teachers are the most burned out workers in the country, and they are quitting in droves. Many teachers also feel that they are not able to pursue their ambitions: teaching children, because the school system has shifted its focus away from educating children. One teacher interviewed by Bloomberg said she felt that schools existed simply to have a place to put children, and that teachers were treated like “cogs in a machine”. Teachers report feeling marginalized, turned into the enemy, and increasingly burdened with tasks that have little to do with their mission.

Source: Bloomberg



We live in a society that fetishizes celebrities and entrepreneurs, and yet, the people we leave our children with and entrust to look after them, and to educate them, are not given any real adulation, and they are paid far below their social importance. Our culture asks teachers to sacrifice themselves, and progressively makes their working conditions worse, without offering any real respite or reward. Teachers don’t have a wonderful pension to look forward to, but they do have to face struggling to pay their bills, and very difficult working conditions. For many teachers, a time comes when they have to put themselves and their families first, and quit, and take a better paying job, with less demands on them. That, for them, is self-care.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/23/2130696/-Why-Teachers-Don-t-Need-to-Self-Care

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