Many people don’t love their jobs (or at least, not every aspect of their jobs), so why are teachers and professors — particularly women — held to a higher standard? Why are they expected to love teaching above all else?, Clio Bluestocking wonders, taking a cue from Professor Zero. In her thought-provoking post, Clio compares the feelings of pressure, worry, and guilt she has toward her job to those often felt by (read: imposed by society upon) mothers:
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.
Which explains why it was so hard for her to confess that … shhhh … teaching is not the be-all and end-all of her existence. And why it took talking to a therapist for her to discover the source of her anxiety about her job:
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 … , 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?
Since then, she’s had an epiphany of sorts. Sure, she likes teaching well enough, but that’s not why she became an academic; rather she got into this line of work because she loves the subject she teaches and teaching affords her a chance to earning a living at it. And that’s OK, because she doesn’t have to love teaching to be good at it, Clio writes.
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.
Readers, how many of you really love teaching?
Follow On Hiring through your favorite RSS reader: 
36 Responses to Confessions of a Teacher
misstrudy - May 13, 2010 at 11:11 am
I don’t love teaching. There are “aspects” of teaching that I very much enjoy, and there are some students I have grown to care deeply about. Sometimes the synergy in the classroom is great and leaves me energized, sometimes it just sucks. What I like about academia is to be in an environment dedicated to scholarship and learning.
physicsprof - May 13, 2010 at 11:42 am
Of the multitude of aspects that constitute teaching I really enjoy only two (I did not become a professor out of love for teaching): explaining non-trivial physical ideas on the blackboard to motivated students (a small fraction of those I normally encounter nowadays), and seeing really good students becoming more adept in physics as a result of it. Everything else is just the day job I am being paid for which I try to do well.
kprabhakar975 - May 13, 2010 at 11:46 am
I love teaching. In fact i change it as i love learning therefore i love teaching. What sucks me is the students who just want to pass the examinations and get out of the system and colleagues who are more politicians than teachers. What i love most is to define everyday the things to learn. The students who challenge the assumptions and have unstoppable enthusiasm to learn make my life most fulfilling experience. Prof.K.Prabhakar
agusti - May 13, 2010 at 11:48 am
Ditto the above. I’m not really a people person, and I love my subject much more than I like teaching. But I think that can work out, just as described in the example above. I have colleagues who seem to be energized by being around students, and I admire that, but I don’t feel the same. I rely on my love for the subject (and the promise of lots of time off during the year to pursue it) to get me through. It works for me and (according to my students and colleagues), I do a good job.
robertkase51 - May 13, 2010 at 12:37 pm
For those that don’t love teaching… it probably shows. It doesn’t mean that your aren’t good at it, but you can always tell those that truly love teaching, just like those who love anything else. Most students identify best and connect with those professors who love to teach and truly connect with helping them turn that light bulb of learning on day after day. Those teachers thrive on it and make it happen. For those that don’t love teaching, but do it so they can love to do something else… it will be a very long unfulfilling job for you, that will probably be spent in academia trying manipulate your position to do less teaching and more self fulfilling research or admistration or something other than the core of educating… teaching. I just hope that those folks find work in research universities and not in schools where teaching is the primary aspect of their loads. Academia is already filled with enough mediocre teachers.
physicsprof - May 13, 2010 at 12:48 pm
Oh, those self-proclaimed “light bulbs of learning”, taking the moral highways…
chroniclebarnacle - May 13, 2010 at 1:02 pm
I love teaching and cannot imagine doing much else. I am puzzled at some of your statements. Why are you saying that women are held to a higher standard over men? You will need to prove that. I do not experience this in my institution as a Department Chair nor would I ever allow it. Also- you say “…because so many people bring so much baggage into the classroom in regard to female authority figures.” I have more female profs in my department than males. We also have more female students than male. Never has the gender of the prof been on the forefront of any discussion- and once again- cannot agree with your statements. I am feeling undercurrents of something else in your article…
robertkase51 - May 13, 2010 at 3:25 pm
To #6… mock those “lightbulbs of learning” if you like, but those who love teaching and continually seek out those teaching moments of comprehension and enlightenment already know what I mean. Those that don’t, never will. Unfortunately, academia has far too many of the latter. It is that passion for teaching that brings meaning to that which others see as endless repetition.
sethmichaud - May 13, 2010 at 3:45 pm
You know what? My life isn’t Mr. Holland’s Opus. I’m not going to sacrifice my health, my financial well-being, and what’s really important to me to nurture along disinterested and lazy students. The idea that a teacher can every student into performing well in college is idiocy. Some students, sure, but most are just want to be rewarded for showing up. Oh, and the pleas for extra credit at the end of the semester? Extra credit = extra work for me. Not interested.
litteach - May 13, 2010 at 4:13 pm
Like many others, I got into this profession because I was interested in my subject… and then one thing led to another. I like some things about teaching but I don’t LOVE it, and I know it because I don’t miss it when I don’t do it. Suggesting that this makes me “mediocre” is really unfair. I don’t do my job badly, as my teaching evaluations show. But I am tired of how emotionally draining it is. Judging fellow teachers because they are willing to admit this is, precisely, the social pressure the article mentions.
supertatie - May 13, 2010 at 4:26 pm
I do love teaching. That said, by December, I need the month away, and by May, I don’t want to see another student for about 4 months. And by August, I can’t wait to see them again. Happens every year, and so I know what it is, and don’t break a sweat about it at all.I also love my subject matter, and will admit that, after 19 years, I would LOVE a research sabbatical.I don’t think that NOT loving teaching necessarily makes someone a bad teacher. But if I were someone’s career counselor, I would be encouraging anyone who felt about her job the way Gabriela does that it is time to find new employment.Oh – and for the record, I don’t think teachers are held to any different of a standard if they happen to be women, any more than mothers are. I think a lot of women CHOOSE to hold themselves to an impossible standard – in their work, their looks, their bodies, their relationships. But these are things they do to themselves, not things that are done “to” them.
dboyles - May 13, 2010 at 4:26 pm
People can talk about love of teaching but when all is said and done such talk can be often no more than “sounding brass or tinkling cymbal.” For many teaching is no more than the demonstration of their ego on display and the kick they themselves receive from it. This alone does not correlate with student learning. The true teacher deliberately structures the classroom experience in such a manner that students have no choice but to learn, and this may come at the expense of the teacher’s performing ego–as well as that of the students’ entertainment gratification. Teaching is more about a love of seeing learning occur on the part of the students because of the efforts of the students. The teacher functions to structure and bring into existence that experience. That brings us to the question, ‘does the teacher love to structure the experience,’ a question which is of a quite different kind. Do I love to structure the classroom experience? Sometimes yes and sometimes it is simply a great deal of work. The true teacher does not cede this reponsibility, however, for not only the students but generations to follow depend upon it.
fortunejc - May 13, 2010 at 4:31 pm
I’m not sure most people who have teaching jobs really know what “teaching” is since so much of what occupies the academic day/life isn’t teaching at all – it’s meaningless bureaucracy.
physicsprof - May 13, 2010 at 4:32 pm
#8, define “passion for teaching”. I have seen too many teachers who believed they were bringing enlightenment to students. And in fact they were loved by students, it did no harm that their classes were enjoyable, they were easy graders, and students were lead to believe that science was fun. Not bad for starters. Unfortunately that’s were it ended. The demonstrations were superficial, explanations often misleading, knowledge levels achieved insufficient. On the other hand I have witnessed less exciting teachers, even boring, who conveyed real knowledge to students without ever saying word “love”. It is quite easy to proclaim love for teaching and entertain yourself with the notion that kowtowing to students stands for the passion to teaching. (Not that I accuse you of it, it is just that “passion” is a soft concept in our profession.)
v8573254 - May 13, 2010 at 4:33 pm
Now that I am retired, I miss the students, but I do not miss teaching them.
tejackso - May 13, 2010 at 4:33 pm
Seems to me that if you really seriously enjoy (‘love’ just doesn’t seem like the right word for this kind of thing) what you study, then you at least probably ought to enjoy trying to get others to understand it. This may not be universal, but is pretty common. but what happens is that academics tend to get personally injured or insulted or outraged when students don’t somehow just leap into a subject with the same energy that we as scholars feel about the subject matter. this is a serious mistake. *of course* most people aren’t going to be like us. why would they be? If students don’t have our same kind of zeal for this particular kind of learning, it doesn’t mean they’re lazy, dense, boneheaded or whatever. It *may* mean this, but it more likely means they’re just not the kind of people who’d find our subject or even college in general interesting. *we’re* the odd ones. somehow people like us who’ve always done well at school and who are the type to commit years of all-consuming study to one subject, just can’t see that there’s exactly no reason in the world that others should be the same way. so if you really enjoy your subject, then you just do what you can to communicate both the content and your own passion about it as well as you can. To me this would be something like “loving” to teach.
mark_r_harris - May 13, 2010 at 4:33 pm
Suggesting that educators need to love their jobs when other professions aren’t held to the same standard is a tool of social control. If you love teaching, you will sacrifice so much to do it, right? You’ll weather uncertain job prospects, and lower salaries than in other professions, and the constant prospect of cutbacks and layoffs and salary givebacks, just to be able to teach. I do love teaching, often, and I am not undercutting that special sparkle that certain people are able to bring to this or any other job. But I agree that the pressure on educators to sacrifice themselves for what they are supposed to “love” doing is utterly insidious. Professionals who hate what they do, and don’t even disguise that fact, are often paid far, far better.
newhill - May 13, 2010 at 4:37 pm
I think that one of the problems many academics encounter is that some of the personality traits that make one an excellent teacher are the opposite of those that make a good researcher. People who love teaching are often extroverts and love being around and interacting with people. People who love writing and research may be more introverted and love hours spent alone in the lab or at the computer and, thus, may find the demands of teaching draining and exhausting. One can learn to be an excellent teacher and act like an extrovert but if it doesn’t fit your natural personality, it can be an ongoing struggle. Academic expectations assume one can excel at both and that can happen but sometimes at great emotional and personal cost.
laur2582 - May 13, 2010 at 4:38 pm
I love being in the classroom, talking about the subject I teach. I love my students as people, and enjoy their youth and their liveliness, even when they aren’t particularly good students. I don’t like, much less love, grading papers. I don’t like, much less love, the politics of academia, the committee work, the “assessment” and “learning outcomes” that have become the newest buzz words of academic life. It seems like it’s the inexorable transition of education as knowledge to education as commodity. All that stuff sucks all the joy out of my job. On the other hand, the opportunity to travel, learn, study, read, talk about what interests me most and earn a living from it is pretty darned cool. All in all, it’s like any job, and better than most. You sure can’t beat the vacations!
kkfungc - May 13, 2010 at 4:44 pm
If we cannot do anything unless we wholeheartedly love it, there would not be much we cannot do in this world? For example, how many meals do we really relish? How many movies do we suffer through even though we do not really enjoy them? In fact, we do most things out of a sense of duty, not love?
dboyles - May 13, 2010 at 4:52 pm
Does the difference between the postings of “PhysicsProf” and “RobertKase51″ reflect more a difference in WHAT they teach and WHO they teach (ie., effectively disciplinary differences)? A content-intensive science course with solutions manuals and textbooks in the 11th edition is much different than, say, a course in the humanities in which latter the professor may seek to construct a course by requiring various readings from original texts. Both call forth different ways of structuring the class. All too often the singularities of our individual practices are in response by differences in the way our disciplines approach and regard knowledge itself. Perhaps the form “love” takes (as highly ambiguous is the word itself) is a function of structuring variables in large part outside the individual teacher. Or so thinks this chemistry professor.
isugeezer - May 13, 2010 at 4:53 pm
I love the autonomy. I love the exchange of energy in the classroom. I love thinking/writing/talking about my subject. I love developing curricula. I love meeting 200 new people each year. I love the performance aspects of teaching. I love going home at the end of the day to silence and solitude. I love the go-go-go followed by the breaks.I hate grading. I hate faculty meetings. I hate being expected to know whether or not a student is lying to me. I hate a system that casts students in the role of “customers.” I hate the idea that the more electronic technology one uses, the “better” one is at teaching. I hate administrators who have never taught, but who feel qualified to make decisions that affect faculty. Whew! Thanks for the reminder.
akprof - May 13, 2010 at 6:30 pm
When I retired, I told the Chancellor that I would have paid him to be allowed to have my job – and, if I had been independently wealthy, I would have! Certainly there were aspects that I liked less than others – but one of the things that I loved was the wide variety of activities and arenas in which I could and did interact and operate. I would have been so bored in any other kind of job, particularly if it restricted my sphere of activity to a single arena. And yest, there were students who I didn’t enjoy interacting – who clearly didn’t want what I had to offer – but for every one of those, there were dozens who appreciated the opportunity to learn thru my efforts to instruct them.
alan_kors - May 13, 2010 at 11:36 pm
The peak experiences of teaching are simply extraordinary…. for those of us who love it, it’s a vocation, not just a job. It’s been decades of intensity and deep satisfaction. Still, the story of the imposed burdens on mothers (oh, the ordeal) and female teachers (my God, the horror) is the saddest story that I never have heard in my life.
your_rights - May 14, 2010 at 12:53 am
I am glad to know that others have similar feelings. When I have students who are able to debate a subject, I really enjoy teaching. But–It is curious that no one mentioned fear. I am terrorified everyday. It is a long continuum of fears from the trivial that: 1) some student may not find me brilliant to 2)what collegue is going to stab me in the back today, to 3)who is going to enter my classroom and kill us. I have become relatively immune to # 1 and 2 but #3 is a daily reality. It is long past time that we start demanding criminal records on ALL faculty, staff and students.
cunningham2 - May 14, 2010 at 1:10 am
I am research-only these days and I really miss the students, and the teaching, teh sheer intellectual challenge of crafting ideas in such a way that the maximum number ‘get it’. Get all despondent when I find some really good, solid, relevant, useful piece of research and don’t have anyone to teach about it.So, students and teaching, yes, but not the grading, as someone else said. DEFINITELY not the grading. Nor the peripherals, like meetings etc.BTW, ther eis research around (no, don’t ask me for the citation) that shows that male profs who act in the standard way are perceived as ‘professional’ and ‘business-like’, i.e. their behaviour is not problematic to students, Female profs who act in the same way are regarded as ‘cold’ and unlikeable. So yes, more is expected of women.
mbelvadi - May 14, 2010 at 8:59 am
your_rights, if you are indeed in fear on a daily basis of #3, you need to take a serious look at moving to another country. I mean that most sincerely, and as someone who has done that myself (and not at all “love it or leave it”). There are lots of “developed” English speaking countries without the pathological violence of the US. Countries like Canada are actively seeking highly educated immigrants – if you are willing to trade off colder winters for not living in fear of your students killing you, give it some serious consideration.
mougin - May 14, 2010 at 9:29 am
Harris above makes a very important point: the expectation that one “loves teaching” can be used to argue that teachers should work for low pay because the work itself is so fulfilling. I recently happened upon a list of the “bottom 10″ lowest paying college majors: education, primary education, and preschool education were all included. Whether or not one loves teaching, its value and the hard work required should be recognized by higher compensation: compensation that would draw some of the best and brightest to teaching.
catlkelley - May 14, 2010 at 9:38 am
Similar to what dboyles said in post #12 above, GOOD teaching is hard work. And you don’t need to have that “spark” or what-have-you to accomplish it. In fact, looking at teaching in a workmanlike way, and seeking to structure the best learning opportunities for students, probably improves teacihng tremendously. Those who pat themselves on the back for “loving” to teach are often the ones who are least inclined to try to improve their technique, in my experience. Many seem to have bought into the myth of the “gifted teacher” who just “knows how to do it” by instinct. Certainly, there are exceptions to this; but “love” for teaching (whatever that really means; and like others I suspect it means too much ego-involvement) is simply not necessary to being a good teacher. I enjoy teaching tremendously. It is difficult but rewarding. But more importantly I *respect the practice* of teaching. The latter is far more important than the former for helping students learn.
tappat - May 14, 2010 at 9:44 am
I have a colleague who says that teaching is only for rudiments — like introducing the alphabet and basic techniques of reading and writing — and so there should be very little teaching done in college. She says lots of thinking should go on, but that’s properly speaking not teaching, while it is powerful learning. Perversely, I like to tell her that her way is impossible to assess, in the manner we like to assess everything today. She says she hates — not loves — that sort of assessment.
cwinton - May 14, 2010 at 10:39 am
Of all these posts, I think I relate most to #22. isugeezer. One other aspect that doesn’t seem to have been mentioned is that we learn from our students. When my career was more defined by research than teaching, I found student insights often served to widen my own perspective on whatever project I was working on at the time. I can’t imagine teaching not complementing research and vice-versa. Also, explaining a complex concept requires looking at it from multiple angles, serving to tighten one’s own grasp of underlying principles and how they work in relation to other ideas.
onlineasllou - May 14, 2010 at 11:47 am
I teach nursing. Not only I am supposed to have a passion for horrible work schedules, abusive patients and families, and working with things (and people) that smell bad … I am supposed to have a “higher calling” for it. And then there is the teaching part of it. (Or is it the other way around?)
jabberwocky12 - May 14, 2010 at 11:57 am
I love teaching – my only regret is that, as I get older, and get promoted, I get to teach less and less. Strange, given that one of the reasons I get promoted is because I’m considered a reasonably good teacher.
isugeezer - May 14, 2010 at 12:02 pm
cwinton: Beautifully stated: “explaining a complex concept requires looking at it from multiple angles, serving to tighten one’s own grasp of underlying principles and how they work in relation to other ideas.”You are right. How could I have forgotten the learning that we experience everyday as a result of our work environment? Now that I seem to be aging faster, I value–more than ever–what my students teach me and the motivation they give me to stay alert and current.
happycamper1212 - May 14, 2010 at 1:53 pm
People who love their work tend to do it well–in spite of the fact that neither love nor work is ever perfect. Discovering and becoming capable of doing work that is worthwhile and enjoyable is what we educators encourage our students to do, so why not do that for ourselves? It’s the administrators’ primary job to make their institutions fit places in which all constituents want to work. When people don’t like their work, the smart ones will find work that they do love. Only the terminally stupid will go right on being miserable and complaining. Because most of us want to love our work, poorly run universities gradually accumulate the terminally stupid, while both the love and the talent move out.
performance_expert2 - May 15, 2010 at 9:37 am
A colleague tells me the count of number of days left. Several colleagues say this, whereas I think in terms of how many days are left and how I can make the most of them, what is possible to impart in the remaining time.Regarding your sexist characterizations, it is an indicator of incompetent management, which is a greater and significant issue, where the worker is activiely made to feel uncomfortable by incompetent managers. When I think of workplace sexism, it is not the demand placed upon females, it is the ten instances of males being singled out and harassed for no other reason than self promotion and sport by the perpetrators.