On the Value of Not Being In LOVE With My Job

I wrote this post over the weekend, scheduled it to appear, then unscheduled it because I worried about what people would think of me not LOVEing teaching. In some ways, being a teacher is like being a mother, especially if you are a woman, because the cultural expectations of women and of teachers are beyond reasonable human abilities and because so many people bring so much baggage into the classroom in regard to female authority figures.

In any case, yesterday Professor Zero put up a post, "On Not Liking Teaching," which resonated with me and gave me the courage to post this one. So, here it is:

For the past three years, my teaching has had me worried. I haven't been worried about the quality, although there is always room for improvement. I have been worried about my fitness.

You see, I just don't LOVE teaching. It's great work, the hours fit my temperament, I work with really good people (with about 3 exceptions, and I don't have to deal with them regularly), but I wonder at my constitutional ability to be a teacher, especially at a community college. Dealing with people tends to wear me out, so dealing with students leaves me exhausted. My students need lots and lots of hand holding, and it drives me nuts more often than I like to admit. By this time of year, I'm miserable, on edge, feeling like a total failure, and hating the world.

This year, however, I brought up the problem in analysis, and the first thing that the analyst made me address was that fact that I don't LOVE teaching. That I don't LOVE my job. That was actually a rather difficult admission because I know how many people do LOVE teaching and would be more than happy to have my job. I felt that I didn't have a right to not LOVE my job because I am so damn lucky to have it. How dare I not LOVE it? Aren't teachers supposed to LOVE teaching -- it makes up for the pay, right?

I still have those feelings.

You see, I didn't get into this line of work because I LOVE teaching. I got into it because I LOVE history. I LOVE entering that alien world of the past and trying to figure out what people did and why they did it. I LOVE the mystery of it. I LOVE the puzzle of it. I LOVE using the evidence to create a narrative. Teaching is just a good means of making a living involved with something that I LOVE and that allows me the time me to pursue research into my own questions and ideas.

I've tried to avoid teaching in order to do the research on its own or to find tandem work that I did LOVE, but those paths didn't work. So, here I am teaching, and I am much happier with this life than I was with any of those perhaps because teaching allows for much more creativity in the job and in the space for original research than those other paths. I am much more satisfied (despite my bitching). Yet, teaching is still just a job to me, and not a job that I LOVE. That fact disturbed me, more so because it made me feel like a failure.

Then, I began to realize that you don't have to LOVE your job.* You just have to do it well. LOVE seemed to involve a commitment of my self, of my emotions, of my life that I really wasn't willing to offer. That was the source of my aversion to the people who kept insisting that teachers should show more "compassion" and "concern" for students. ("What does that mean?" I wondered. "How much more do they want? I can't teach 150 independent studies in order to show compassion for 150 individual complicated lives!") None of this was, of course, in evaluations or in any critique of my teaching. Instead, it seemed more of a cultural pressure intensified by these teaching/learning classes that our faculty are required to take.

That demand on my emotions was the source of my fears that I wasn't a good teacher if I wasn't working on teaching at least 60 hours each week. That was the source of my fear that I was a bad and terrible person for being annoyed by my students and feeling overwhelmed by their needs and problems. That was the source of my guilt when I became angry with my students. If being a good teacher meant that you had to LOVE teaching, then I was a miserable failure.

If being a teacher was a job without the requirement of emotional commitment, however, then I could figure out how to do it better without feeling like a failure as an educator and a person.

Don't get me wrong, I do like teaching. If I hated it I would absolutely find something else to do as I have done before. You can be satisfied and not LOVE your job -- heck, you might not even have to like it, just tolerate it. If you hate it, however, you will be nothing but miserable; and you will find no reason to do it any better than the minimum amount necessary to keep you from being fired. That's not the case here at all, no matter how much I rant and rave.

I'm lucky enough that do like my job. I want to do far more than the minimum amount to keep my contract renewed. I care if the students learn about history (and what that means is a topic for another post), if they can write a coherent sentence, if they know where to find reliable information, and if they can start to think critically about some of the world. I really do want them to leave the class and not hate history. I think the job is important and worth doing. Furthermore, as I wrote above, I'm at a good campus, with good colleagues and fascinating students, I get to talk about history all day, and I get to indulge my love of performing. I am also always trying to do it better in one way or another; but the better, I am learning, doesn't have to involve total emotional commitment that LOVE seems to require.

Teaching is a job, but a job worth doing well and one that I like doing well even if I don't LOVE it. Once I admitted all of this to myself, I actually found that I could deal with a lot of problems that made me question my fitness as a teacher. By approaching those problems as puzzles, I could simply solve them and take satisfaction in that. Doing a good job is much easier when you aren't beating yourself up because you don't LOVE it. The problems are outside of yourself, fixable, not inherent failings.

Therefore, I am becoming a better teacher by NOT loving teaching.


---------------------
*Does anyone give a damn if stockbrokers LOVE their jobs, or attorneys, or policemen, or plumbers? Hell, no one cares if the cashier at the grocery store LOVES her job. They just care that they get through the line quickly and get the correct change.