A Response to Farewell to Teaching Letters Everywhere

A new epistolary sub-genre has emerged on social media over the past few years: the Farewell to Teaching Letter, in which a devoted, conscientious, and often “award winning” teacher explains to the world why he or she can no longer continue working in the classroom. If you are a teacher, you have no doubt received links to such letters, likely as a gesture of solidarity from well-meaning friends who think you would appreciate the fact that here at last is someone who gets it. And maybe you do appreciate it. But I would like to suggest here that you should not.

Probably these letters are benign in their intent. The writers, often teachers in their first several years of service, take great pains to establish their credibility as friends of public education and advocates for children. They assure us that their love for children is what drove them to the classroom in the first place, and that nothing would make them happier than to continue to work with these wonderful students on into perpetuity. Then they drop the Big However on us, explaining why such a course is heartbreakingly impossible, providing a litany of complaints--all of them reasonable, each describing problems that the vast majority of us agree should be fixed--issues like class sizes and excessive testing. The letter ends with a summary of the tragic state of affairs that’s meant to have us applaud sadly, joining in the damnation of a system we might otherwise support. In this way, the Farewell to Teaching letter becomes pernicious in its effect, inviting us to join in the accidental or intentional slur against those of us who have chosen to stay.

 

I understand why publishing a Farewell to Teaching Letter may seem an appealing option. It may be as hard to quit teaching as it is to practice it. Most of us go into the classroom in our youth, as idealists, seeking something of the pastoral work that once fell in the domain of the priest or the monk. We understand that we’re not in it for the money or respect (a conscious sacrifice of status that makes us objects of suspicion in this society), but for the possibility of doing good in the world, of engaging in heroic work that makes a positive difference for our students. We make this choice in full hearing range of all the calumnies so frequently leveled against the profession.

 

Then we discover that teaching is hard--harder than we ever could have anticipated in those years when, as students, we sat back in the classroom and thought, “God, this teacher sucks!” We discover to our horror that those students whom we hoped to shepherd toward enlightenment are sitting in their desks, thinking the very same insults about us. And we suspect, in spite of ourselves, that they are right. 

 

We encounter this moment early in our careers, realizing to our bewilderment that nothing--not our youthful good looks or charm, not our professional preparation, credentials, or degrees, not even our passion for the subject matter and for the students themselves--will automatically make us an effective teacher. When that moment comes, we have a choice: find someone to blame for our failure--in the Farewell to Teaching Letter, it’s often the parents or that safest of targets, “the system”--or adjust our sights and find a way to work within the constraints and challenges that we hadn’t before anticipated.

 

It must be hard to admit to failure after making such a daring and public career choice. But many do so with quiet dignity: That frequently cited statistic that over half of all new teachers leave the profession within the first five years, opting for some easier line of work. They don’t all write Farewell to Teaching Letters. But writers of the Farewell to Teaching Letter feel some need to rationalize publicly their decision to quit. 

 

The latest such missive to come across my Facebook page was purportedly written by a woman who stresses that even with the benefits of “the best team, the best students and parents...and the best elementary school,” she could not in good conscience continue. Excuse me, but she couldn’t make it work with “the best team, the best students and parents...and the best elementary school”? Then I think there’s something else at work here. Maybe it’s not the system, but her. Perhaps teaching was simply too hard; perhaps she was simply not good enough (though I doubt it). Very few of us are good enough in those first few years. It is no disgrace to be beaten by such difficult work. There should be no shame in admitting when you’re licked. But no one wants to publish a letter that says, “I’m quitting teaching not because of the system, but because I couldn’t adjust to it.” It’s far more appealing to write a thundering jeremiad which projects one’s embarrassment out onto the system itself.

 

I do not wish to attack this teacher for her decision to leave the profession--as much as I wish she’d stayed. (She sounds, at least by her own account, like an excellent teacher.) I wish instead to defend those of us who have stayed against the implication that we have necessarily compromised our integrity. For in making such a big deal of their departures, writers of the Farewell to Teaching Letter are tacitly (if unintentionally) suggesting that those us who’ve stayed in the classroom have sold out to the system they’ve so passionately attacked. 

 

But who’s sold out, really? The problems these writers complain about won’t be fixed anytime soon. The solution to overcrowded classrooms, by my reckoning, is not fewer qualified teachers, but more: a massive investment of public money into professional preparation and school infrastructure. Sadly, we are experiencing quite the opposite: a massive teacher shortage brought on at least partly by almost forty years of invective against the public schools that has rendered teaching an undesirable profession. If your answer to this drought of qualified teachers in our classrooms is to take your professional preparation and go home, then I’m sorry, I must question both your motives and your credibility.

 

In the meantime, our students need good teachers now. They can’t afford to sit around and wait for us to deign the system worthy of our presence. They need us to to discover ways to work within the imperfect system. Many superb teachers do so. They ask tough questions of administration: “Is this test really necessary?” “Why are we closing the library when we’ve talked endlessly about the importance of reading?” But they also ask tough questions of themselves: “Am I being fair in this classroom policy?” “How do I move away from an authoritarian stance and instead establish credibility with my students?”  

 

What does it take to become secure enough to ask such questions? Some strange combination of failure, humility, patience, and experience. Yet in the Farewell to Teaching Letter, the departing teacher, by spending so much time establishing his or her excellence before dropping the bombshell, has shown no sign of having engaged in this kind of humility. We are given to understand that they are precisely the kind of teacher who should be in the classroom, superb teachers who have been destroyed by the system.

 

I would like to invite such teachers to reconsider their decision. If they are as great as they have assured us they are (and I have no reason to believe otherwise), then let me repeat the fact that your students need you, in person, in the classroom. By pronouncing the system so rotten as to be immune to the efforts of good teachers, you may be depriving yourselves of the most satisfying years of your career, years of powerful growth when you begin to see things you hadn’t noticed before. Until then, let’s call out the Farewell to Teaching Letter for what it is: an act of vanity that achieves no good for anybody.