Ambition and the Teacher

I'm picking back up with some thoughts on ambition. You can find the other posts here.

When we were on our Hawaii trip a few weeks back my wife and I drove up to Hawi, a cute little hippie town on the north end of the Big Island, for a sushi lunch and some conversation. As we took our post-lunch constitutional, I started telling her about some of my writing ambitions for the year. Then we started talking more broadly about ambition. In career paths before teaching ambition was always a pretty straightforward matter. You work hard in order to move up the proverbial ladder. 

But what about a job where there is no ladder?

Sure, I can strive to become a department chair someday and maybe something like that will happen. But most other modes of advancement are out. I don't want to be an administrator because I love the classroom. I don't care about being recruited by a "better" school because I already teach at a fantastic school. I have no short-term plans for a Ph.D. or immediate ambition to teach at the collegiate level. Some of this stuff might/could happen someday but it is all Someday. And, there is no clear path to the achievement of this goal.

So it makes the career a perplexing choice for inspiring and fostering ambition. This is part of the reason I think that teaching can be a frustrating career choice for so many. In The Gift of Failure, Jessica Lahey notes that the average post-college teacher lasts just three years in the classroom. There are myriad factors behind this (too many to innumerate here), but I think at least an important one has to be that teaching can feel like a dead end gig. And while the popular claim that teachers typically come from the bottom third of academic performers has been, if not entirely debunked, then seriously called into question, the fact remains that teaching has fallen out of the public estimation as a noble and necessary career.  I have no doubt that some of this is fair and some of this is unfair, but whether justified or not the end result is that both good and bad teachers are maligned and considered, in the words of the old aphorism, as "those who can't do." Which can only serve to cement this notion further.

All of this makes it hard to know how to be ambitious as a teacher. Does it mean to focus solely on classroom excellence, lesson planning, and curriculum development? Is it something I measure based on student survey responses? Is the standard that I simply try to remain happy doing this job? Do I try to become a writer and someone known for educational philosophy or independent scholarship?

My guess is that it is some combination of all of these, though the latter one is hard to pull off. But I trust you see the bind. It is not a straightforward prospect and it makes those of us who are ambitious often unsure of what to do with that ambition. In no way does this decrease my love of this career--it is by far the best I have ever had--but it does mean I am going to have to figure some of this stuff out as I go.