Continuing catching up on posts and comments jotted down during a busy August- two trips and school starting. Oxford Mississippi kids returned to school- full time, on August 6th.

Sarah Fine’s, “Schools Need Teachers Like Me. I just Can’t Stay” gives a heartfelt accounting of why, after four years of teaching in “Room 108 of the Cesar Chavez Public Charter School on Capitol Hill” she was leaving teaching. She charts her beginning, her love for teaching, successes and failures, and the grind that become so burdensome- coupled with negative- often borderline hostile social attitudes- directed toward teachers.

Reading her account, she’s spot-on on most of the issues. I taught in private schools but still received the comments and questions that always amounted to: “why are you teaching: couldn’t/shouldn’t you be doing something better?”

In the end, I feel for Fine but I’m saddened by her seeming capitulation to the low social status of teaching. I’m also irritated with her administration for being unwilling or unable to help fine define limits and compartmentalize the job. Then, again, I too am in the private sector now.

Selected excerpts from “Schools Need Teachers Like Me. I just Can’t Stay:”

“…As for me, I plan to travel, write and try not to think too much about what I have left behind.

When I was a first-year teacher fresh out of college, I got a lot of questions about my chosen profession. I usually said that I was inspired by my grandmother, who taught in the Boston public schools for 35 years. The real truth was that, like many of my peers, I had fallen in love with the idea of the job. Urban classrooms struck me as seductively gritty, and it only seemed right that I “give back” after spending 22 years in a suburban, Ivy League bubble. I rarely voiced this sentiment because I was afraid of sounding cavalier.

Four years later, the question I encounter is equally thorny: Why leave teaching? It’s not just a question about how I’ll pay my rent. Reformers have big plans to transform failing urban schools, and their work hinges on finding a way to keep strong teachers in the classroom. By throwing in the towel, I have become one more teacher abandoning her students…

“…burnout.” That term is shorthand for a suite of factors that contributed to my choice to leave the classroom. When I talk about the long hours, for example, what I mean is that, over the course of four years, my school’s administration steadily expanded the workload and workday while barely adjusting salaries. More and more major decisions were made behind closed doors, and more and more teachers felt micromanaged rather than supported. One afternoon this spring, when my often apathetic 10th-graders were walking eagerly around the room as part of a writing assignment, an administrator came in and ordered me to get the class “seated and silent.” It took everything I had to hold back my tears of frustration…

‘Why teach?’ they (non-teachers) ask.

Do my lawyer and consultant friends find themselves having to explain why they chose their professions? I doubt it. Everyone seems to know why they do what they do. When people ask me about teaching, however, what they really seem to mean is that it’s unfathomable that anyone with real talent would want to stay in the classroom for long. Teaching is an admirable and, well, necessary profession, they say, but it’s not for the ambitious. “It’s just so nice,” was the most recent version I heard, from a businesswoman sitting next to me on a plane.

I used to think I was being oversensitive. Not so. One of my former colleagues, now a program director for Teach for America, has to defend her goal of becoming a principal: “When I tell people I want to do it, they’re like, ‘Really? You really still want to do that?’ ” Another friend describes her struggle to make peace with the fact that a portion of the American public sees teaching as a second-rate profession. “I want to be able to do big things and be recognized for them,” she says. “In the world we live in, teaching doesn’t cut it.”

I often feel the same way. Teaching is a grueling job, and without the kind of social recognition that accompanies professions such as medicine and law, it is even harder for ambitious young people like me to stick with it…” (WP)