Some Burnt-Out Cases...

"Judy," 40, says: "What got to me was that I found I was not getting results." A Bryn Mawr graduate who always wanted to be a teacher in a big city, she successfully taught English for eleven years in a Manhattan high school. Her enthusiasm began to falter three years ago when each of her five high school classes crept above the union maximum of 34 students. Says she: "No English teacher should have five classes. If you're trying to teach kids how to read and write, you simply can't do it--that's 200 students a day." In effect, Judy gave up teaching because she wanted to teach. Says she: "Many of my colleagues were not making an effort. The administration failed to recognize excellence, failed to recognize mediocrity, and failed to recognize negligence--except if you punched your timecard a few minutes late."

"Diana," 38, has taught high school history for ten years in a mostly black Washington, D.C., school. Says she: "I'm not really burned out, but there are a lot of problems and not much hope."

Homework? "Mostly there's no homework because they can't read. Ten years ago it was different. But these kids today are the product of the time when people thought forcing blacks to learn English was unfair. Just let them speak black English and 'kinda let them do their thing' was the way it went. So they can't read. Parents are awfully upset. But when I call them to suggest they enroll their kids in remedial work, a lot of them are not interested. They just don't want to face the problem."

"Tracking," the grouping of students by ability, is no longer possible because it is discriminatory. "Too many whites are always in the upper track," Diana explains. But she finds that even in a virtually all-black school, just maintaining order among the non-learners keeps her from working with the 5% of the class, again mostly black, who can read well and want to learn: "They just sit around and die of boredom while I try to keep the other kids from fighting."

"Harold," 50, is the son of a South Carolina millworker. With an M.A. in literature from Duke University, he headed north and took a job as a bank teller while working toward his New York teaching certificate. In 1963 he became an English teacher in a big New York City high school. Six years later, seeking a change, he spent a year at a suburban school, but was bored. "That's when I learned how much I identified with the deprived kids in Manhattan." Back in the city, Harold helped launch a special reading program. "We were all weary of failure in trying to teach academic subjects to high school kids who read on a fifth-grade level," he says. "We saw reading as the key by which these kids could gain success." For six years, Harold's group faced constant opposition from the school's principal, who was embarrassed at all the attention to a remedial program for tenth-graders supposed to be taking high school courses. In 1974, during the city's big economic crisis, the program's teachers were let go or transferred.

"My plan now is to take early retirement in 1982 after completing 20 years in the classroom," says Harold. "I don't think many people believe any more in the validity of a democratic public education. That is, one where kids from various groups rub elbows and actually learn from each other. The question then is, what do we really want in education?" Harold still is an excellent teacher, and he likes the spirit of the children in his school. But, he says, "when I look out at a class of 35 sophomores and I know that the reading levels in it are everywhere from fourth to tenth grade, I know that society has presented me with an impossible teaching assignment."

"Dorothy," 36, a Chicago elementary school teacher, told school officials she had the flu for five days last month. In fact, she spent the time hiding at home reading The Tale of Genji, an 11th century Japanese novel of love and manners. Says she: "Some days I can't bear to go to school. My legs won't take me to the classroom." After 13 years of teaching, Dorothy is a classic case of teacher burnout, and she hopes to find a job in public relations. But she remembers proud moments from years ago: her rousing student production of Tom Sawyer, the months she worked with a nine-year-old Hispanic student until he finally learned long division. These days, though, she lets her student teacher run the class: "I told him I don't care what he does with the kids just as long as he returns them to me quiet."

Why has she given up? Paperwork, the yanking of her favorite subjects (science and geography) from the curriculum, she answers. But as she talks, what emerges is a general hopelessness and resentment of a faceless bureaucratic system. On pressure to bring up test scores, for example, she says: "It doesn't matter that the kid is a Pakistani, and his home life is bad and he can't read English." Feeling she can neither help her students nor please the administration depresses her and makes her defensive and cynical--about the school and herself. Says she: "The good teachers have all quit to save their sanity. I hate to tell people I'm a teacher."

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