Letter Twenty-four: The Possibility of Failure
Every adversity, every failure, every heartache,
carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.
–Napoleon Hill
No beginning teacher wants even to consider the prospect of professional failure. But just as students fail, teachers fail. Some have claimed that less than half survive the first five years of teaching. (The data clearly indicate that claim to be overblown, however.[1]) In any case, whatever the data, some teachers do not make it and I address that prospect in this letter.
There are many reasons why teachers fail. One is that some of them are placed in impossible settings. A professional circus lion tamer with a chair and a whip would have a difficult time dealing with a particular group of screaming maniacs, yet school administrators glibly assign rank beginners to teach such groups, caring too little about the inevitable results. They often even exacerbate the problem by providing little or no support for this teacher. The blame for those results is then assigned to the beginner.
You have probably seen motion pictures about teachers placed in extremely difficult settings, but who have come through with flying colors. The list of such films is very long: Blackboard Jungle, To Sir With Love, Up the Down Staircase, Freedom Writers, Conrack, Dead Poets Society, and Mr. Holland’s Opus come to mind.[2] While I enjoy such films as entertainment, I always find myself thinking about my former teaching colleagues who worked hard to deal with students not half as tough as those in the movie but failed.[3]
This problem of teaching in impossible settings is made worse by today's insistence on evaluating teachers by technology: how well their students do on standardized tests. I am reminded in this regard of a beginning teacher who was assigned 47 students in her homeroom, which contained only 30 desks. “I’ll have students hanging out the windows,” she complained to her principal. “Don't worry,” the principal responded, “you’ll have plenty of room.” And indeed she did: on no day did more than 15 to 20 students show up. “And some of them lasted only until the free lunch each day," she told me. Despite this, the teachers in that school would be evaluated on all 47 of those students, never mind whether they ever had a chance to teach them.
But even when the setting is reasonable and you have teachable students, you may fail. One very common reason for failure is a difference in philosophy. Many of you have graduated from programs that focus on such things as the development of student creativity and general problem solving skills and now you find yourself in a school whose entire focus is on drill-and-practice. You may be issued a textbook that reflects this approach: each textbook example is followed by dozens of exercises similar to that example, some of them starred, which means that they appeared on past standardized tests. If you don't accommodate to this approach, you can be in trouble. (See Ray’s response to this kind of situation in Letter Twelve.) You must realize that it is quite possible to be right in your philosophy of teacher education and even a breath of fresh air to your students, yet fail to retain your job.
Early Failures
Far too many beginning teachers fail the first minute they step foot in their classroom. Despite the best of intentions they simply do not fit in this setting. As contemporary headlines too often illustrate, too many teenagers are bullies. Often they adopt this posture as a defense: second-raters themselves, they join in picking on any student or teacher who is different from them in some way (for example, in academic accomplishment) and they seek ways to make that individual uncomfortable.
Accustomed to a culture of achievement, some teachers are unable to accommodate to the culture of their students. When I talk to such teachers, I usually ask them to think back to their own experience in school. The answer they give is either that they attended a school whose focus was on academics or they were isolated and often bullied in a more comprehensive school. While the latter group has a better chance to find a way to fit in, they may carry with them the same characteristics that caused them to be bullied as students.
I always found it easy to pick such prospective teachers out from my college classrooms and I tried to counsel them privately to understand their shortcomings and to think carefully about how to proceed. In most cases these young men and women found it easy to find teaching positions, but few of them succeeded. What bothered me about their failure was the inability of those who hired them to identify the characteristics that were so clear to me. and either not to hire them or to provide them the counseling they would need to survive in the classroom.
A few of those teachers did make it, however; some of them even became very successful in their careers. But almost all of those who did well taught in settings that accommodated to them rather than the reverse. Most often they taught in private or parochial schools in which academic achievement matched their own preferences. There they found students who shared many of their own characteristics and they were able to manage them satisfactorily.
How Can You Handle Failure?
Okay, let's assume you have failed. You learn that you are no longer to continue in your current position. For most of us this is a devastating experience. It is one thing to fail a course in school or college; it is quite something else to fail at our chosen profession. And often those of us who fail in a school setting have never experienced failure before: in fact we have usually been exceptionally successful students ourselves.
Failing forces you to reassess your future. Should you try to find another teaching position or should you give up on teaching and identify another career?
Before you make that important decision, you should evaluate what went wrong. And here you should not focus on the school setting; rather, you should focus on your own response to that setting. It is too easy to say: the kids were bad, the administration was no help, your colleagues looked only to their own interests and shared nothing with you, the parents interfered, the school was concerned only with successful athletic teams. Every one of those things may be true, but other teachers were able to address those problems and you were not.
I suggest that you take this assignment seriously. Write out a list of the things you did wrong and try to be as specific as possible. It is no help to say you didn't accommodate to your students. It is a rare teacher who does entirely. Remind yourself how you mishandled interactions with individual students, specific events that went wrong, colleagues you irritated. This is a difficult and painful task but, if you take it seriously, it can serve you well.
Once you have made your list, look at each point and rethink it. Could you have done something different and addressed that problem satisfactorily? If you find that you have enough positive answers to those questions, you have every right to decide to try to continue teaching. If not, hopefully then you will have satisfied yourself that teaching is not for you.
Can You Start Over?
Let's assume that your inventory encourages you. Can you find another job? Of course, this depends on the current availability of teaching positions and you have a serious blemish on your record. You will certainly not be dealing from a position of strength.
Here is a suggestion about what you might do. Make an appointment with the administrator who fired you. At the outset assure your administrator that you are not questioning the decision to let you go. Then share your list of the problems you failed to address satisfactorily and how you believe you can address them. And finally ask for a recommendation that indicates how you are addressing your shortcomings. Such a recommendation can do much to counter the black mark your failure represents.
Starting Over
Be assured that many teachers have failed and then overcome failure. But, if you do find a new position, see to it that you commit as few of your prior errors as possible. This book should be as meaningful to you then as I hope it was when you began your first assignment.
Jon Unger, a high school algebra teacher, made the following remarks in a 2015 commencement speech at his Madieira High School commencement. Although his remarks were aimed at graduating seniors, I believe they should speak to you as well:
As you move into your futures, I am not going to wish you a fairy-tale life where you live happily ever after. I am not going to wish you a road without bumps and dead ends and obstacles. I am not going to wish you a world without hardship. Instead, I am going to wish you the strength to persevere when everything around you is falling apart. I am going to wish you the ability to rise from the ashes and bounce back stronger than ever when it seems like nothing is going your way. I am going to wish you the faith, wisdom, and guidance to overcome all which comes to you, to find the silver lining in every cloud, to find the compensation in every loss. Vince Lombardi, the famous football coach, put it well when he said: ‘The glory is not in never falling down. The glory is in fighting to get up every time you do get knocked down.’ Another writer said this thought in a different way which I have always found inspiring: ‘Only when the sky is darkest can I see the stars.’[4],[5]
[1] Craig McBride has studied this claim – 12% annual turnover leading to (.88)5 = 53% remaining after five years – and found it to be unsubstantiated when applied to beginners only. Taken from U.S. Department of Labor and Department of Education statistics, this one-half leaving includes all teachers and such reasons as retirement, transfer and promotion.
[2] I have not included Stand and Deliver, because it is a film of a teacher, Jaime Escalante, who has achieved success in a difficult setting. In this sense he and this film represent a counterexample to my list.
[3] The script for these films is boilerplate. Scene One: An impossible situation is established: a school in a dreary urban setting with a blacktop schoolyard strewn with trash, locked school doors and boarded up windows, school halls filled with students screaming, pushing and grappling, a filthy classroom that would better serve Dickens’ Wackford Squeers into which several dozen of these half-dressed teenagers (best played by down-on-their-luck actors in their late twenties) arrive to arrange themselves around but not in desks. Scene Two: Enter the young man or woman who will teach these malcontents. And suddenly all is well. The students not only take their seats but the boys shave and both boys and girls adopt reasonable clothing.
My favorite among films of this genre is Up the Down Staircase, derived from a humorous novel by Bel Kaufman. I enjoyed the book, but the teacher in the film is acted by Sandy Dennis, an actress with a high whiney voice who is at her best playing roles in which she is bullied. I found myself giggling at the stupidity of the film producers who assigned her this lion-taming role.
[5] Jon Unger's complete commencement talk is posted as of this writing at http://dianeravitch.net/2015/06/08/a-graduate-of-harvard-law-school-who-became-an-algebra-teacher-addresses-the-class-of-2015/. I recommend it to you as it carries a message to every one of us about commitment and compensation.
