Born a Teacher, Die a Teacher?

2024. The current statistics indicate that the profession of teaching is in trouble and is failing to recruit young teachers who can stay the course of an entire professional life within teaching in the way that this always been the case historically. Many of the new teachers that are recruited have an attrition rate of more than 33% within the first three to five years of joining the profession. Rather than allowing the media frenzy of emphasising these dire statistical straits, would it not serve us as a society to turn at least some of our collective focus to what it is that has some elder teachers continuing on well past retirement age in some capacity, whether that be full time, part time, or indeed relief work?

In the past two decades there have been innumerable changes in education in terms of statistical accountability, administrative tasks, more complex curriculum and the factor of more and more complex cases and learning difficulties presenting as part of the norm in our classrooms on a daily basis.

All of these factors have contributed to the situation where many professionals believe that teaching is actually killing them in terms of the stress and pressure that they experience within their job. I've heard it said by more than one colleague, that they're ‘getting out of it before it kills them’.

This then arises again the question, if you are born a teacher, do you die a teacher? Not that you die from the profession per se, but that the commitment, the professionalism, the dedication is so strong that your innate sense of being born a teacher, sustains as a clear and motivating purpose right until the elder years, so that ultimately, you die still the teacher.

In my own case, I grew up knowing I was to be a teacher. I would teach my dolls, my younger sisters, and I was teaching the five year old infants at my own primary school when I was all of 9 and 10 years.  Clearly, teaching was part of my preassigned path through life. However, as a young woman, I was side swiped into other academic areas because teaching was seen as being of lesser social value than what my grades and degree achievement indicated I should aspire to. It was only after several abortive, alternative careers and the death of a significant family members in my 30s, that I actually reverted back to what I had known was my vocation as a child, then returning to university to do a postgraduate qualification in teaching. I have now been teaching for almost 30 years and I have no immediate intention to leave, even though I am in my mid-sixties.

There was no way that I was not going to reconnect with the profession of teaching, but it is interesting to register that the heady mixture of social expectation and the reading of my life path or potential based solely on norm based data correlations that came in to push me off track, quite possibly impacts many other young people also. The square peg, round hole scenario could be at work in so many sectors of society, including within the teaching profession. Are we possibly recruiting young people into teaching degrees whose vocation lays elsewhere? Are we also pushing away young people who actually have a true vocational call for teaching?  This is undoubtedly one rich area of research potential.

For my first practicum experience, I was placed with an elder teacher. She offered me the greatest confirmation of my professional life: Coleen ~ you are a born teacher. It’s in your blood and oozes out in everything you are doing.

This was all I needed to reignite in full the vocation I had known to be true for me as child.

In former times, there was a valuing of the sense of vocation, often present relatively early in life, that represented a clear, even pure, calling regarding one’s life purpose. This has now been eroded away to where we rely almost exclusively on data profiles, grades and social and family expectations to determine our life’s path. Something as ‘nebulous’ as a calling has lost traction in the modern world.

Is there a way to bridge these two worlds of post-modern data analysis with the inner factor of vocation?

Enter elder teachers.

Is it possible that by studying what sustains these amazing professionals that we can build a data profile from the final completing part of the teaching career, a factor analysis of which qualities clearly guarantee longevity of vocational dedication literally unto death, or, more likely, until the physical body indicates that it is time to hang up the grand oratory style of the teacher, along with the marking pen and the ruler?

Part 2 of this article offers a beginning research study of 2 elder teachers, 1 in their 70’s and 1 in their 80’s, and simply poses questions that invite them to share what is it that inspired them to enter the profession, what kept them going when so many falter at much younger ages and finally, what it is that keeps them coming back?

Enjoy!

Read Part 2: A Tale of Two Teachers