In this era of teacher shortages, aspiring educators are being inundated with all sorts of advice: master your time management, set time aside for self-care, take advantage of mental-health programs and so on.
Of course, this is all great advice to combat burnout. However, there is one piece of the conversation that I believe is largely omitted from the teacher shortage discourse.
Teachers and aspiring educators need to get organized.
If we want to improve the learning conditions of students, we have to improve the working conditions for teachers, and we can’t rely on individual solutions, such as self-care, to solve systemic problems.
Ever since I started pursuing a career in education, I was told the one skill I need to learn above all others is time management.
Teaching is demanding. It requires discipline, professionalism, the ability to write lesson plans, grade assignments and collaborate with colleagues in a timely manner.
Developing time management as a skill is non-negotiable. However, teaching as a profession does not exist in a vacuum, and we can’t self-care ourselves into better working conditions.
Teachers today are working within the context of growing class sizes, declining wages and excessive work hours. These material forces shape the subjective experiences of every educator.
In addition to teachers having to master time management, they are maximizing their productivity, resulting in a simple reality—teachers are being squeezed. Granted, this phenomenon plagues all workers across the board, as the gap between productivity and compensation has increased dramatically since 1979, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Regardless, the scope of the problem goes beyond learning how to manage our own time. Evidently, there is a limit in pursuing internal solutions when facing external problems.
What we need to be learning is how to organize our workplaces. No doubt, the teacher shortage is getting worse, but it will not spontaneously improve on its own, according to the Washington Post.
History teaches us that working conditions only improve when regular people and workers stand up for themselves. The sooner young educators learn that the fight for a living wage, manageable class sizes and reasonable work hours is also a fight for quality education, the sooner we can put the teacher shortage behind us.
Research from the University of South Carolina School of Law’s Abby Minihan, a second-year law student, suggests that unions can help solve the teacher shortage because they protect workers, ensure a safe work environment and provide quality pay and benefits.
Some labor unions like the National Education Association have already begun to tackle the teacher shortage by providing paid apprenticeship programs and additional compensation during student teaching.
Other research from the Economic Policy Institute suggests that teacher unions reduce stress, while non-unionized teachers report higher degrees of burnout. This research belongs in the teacher shortage discourse just as much, if not more so, than the emphasis on self-management. The benefits of organized labor teaches us its necessity.
Moreover, crises, such as the current shortage, can only be resolved when masses of people come together, organize and make demands. By over-focusing on individualism and self-care, we fail to make the connection between labor and learning.
At the end of the day, working conditions are learning conditions.
Jason Farias can be reached at 581-2812 or at jsfarias@eiu.edu.
