Teaching in Today’s Society

Many people I have encountered believe educators choose to teach because we get off most holidays, get paid decently with good benefits for work that isn’t too difficult, and get the summer off. However, this couldn’t be farther from the truth.  As department chair, I spent three weeks of my summer interviewing new candidates for two openings that we had in our department.  I worked on a team with six of my colleagues to rewrite the curriculum for three different courses and I still have to plan for a brand new course I am teaching this year.  After 15 years of teaching, I am finally making a decent living wage.  I also spend most of my days teaching students who come from unstable and underprivileged backgrounds and are dealing with serious issues of abuse and neglect at home.  Many people who start working at our school leave within the first year to go to a different school or leave the profession altogether.

The ever-growing and divided opinions represented on new media platforms and social media absolutely play a role in stereotyping not only educators but everyone and everything.  This sort of stereotyping is making a very negative impact not only on educators but our entire education system.  We are living in a world where people are constantly judging each other without any sort of knowledge of the issue that they are commenting on.  People in the community used to trust educators, but more and more we are represented in the news and online as people who can’t be trusted even though most of us are more than qualified to be in the classroom with students.  On the flip side, many educators are using these media platforms to inform the public of the hardships that we are facing in our classrooms, schools, and communities and about ways that we are trying to help our students succeed regardless of the lack of support many of us are getting.

Our world is a different place than it was 20 years ago with the influx of social media and the ability to have technology at our fingertips.  I have personally seen a drastic decline in my students' reading and writing skills as well as their ability to socially interact with others.  Sure, the time spent at home during the pandemic didn’t help, but it isn’t the only culprit.  People are addicted to their cell phones and their social media accounts, which is ironic since it is causing them to be less social.  Cases of students having ADD, ADHD, chronic depression, and emotional instability in my classroom have risen and many of the high school students in my school have no concept of very basic social skills and norms because they haven’t learned them.  Many schools in our area have been teaching SEL (social/emotional learning) classes to students in grades K-9 because of the lack of these skills that we see in our students.  Our state also just banned the use of cell phones in classrooms the week before our school year began this year because students have become so immersed in their online world that they are not putting forth effort in their classes which is causing state test scores and graduation rates to drop.