Confronting the Five-Year Itch

It started as an email:  “I’m not sure that I’m going to be able to maintain teaching… .”

Then another:  “Does teaching ever get any easier?”

A third told me, “We’re on our fourth principal in three years… .”

A steady stream of frustration-laced emails continued over several weeks. They culminated in a gathering and discussion over bad food in a local pool hall in Los Angeles. Six teachers attended. All had graduated from the same teacher-education program. All were in their fifth year of teaching.

There is much folklore and conflicting research about fifth-year teachers. A few years ago, I heard a speaker for The Education Trust argue that the five-year itch in teaching is a myth. She said that teacher job and career satisfaction are commensurate with other careers; that is, some teachers are happy, some are not, but all humans grumble and complain. Other research indicates that many teachers vacate the profession entirely [2] during or soon after the fifth year.

I asked the six teachers what they were feeling. All of them were aware of the research on the fifth year and its conflicting conclusions. That became a focus of the conversation. Most of the teachers remained convinced that they would avoid burnout. They had all entered the profession knowing full well that the job was demanding on time, personal life, intellect, psyche, emotions, and soul. In the beginning, they had all reveled in that. Each said that a quixotic burst of energy and hope helped get them through the day. They spoke of how they still loved the intellectual work involved – the reading, the research, the lesson designs, and the actual teaching in classrooms. And they still loved sharing space with the wonder, whimsy and power of the minds of children.

However, all six struggled with the constant change occurring at their schools. These changes seemed to be structural, authoritarian, and had little to do with individual students. Instead, they had everything to do with raising test scores. Many teachers had already witnessed multiple reform efforts during their five years. Teaching well is hard work and takes time. To these teachers, it seemed that their time was being used in ways that are counterproductive and counterintuitive to teaching better.

Listening to these teachers made me realize how they are similar to junior associates in a law firm. Teachers and junior associates alike have to do all their own grunt work – running around, making copies, checking with higher-level staff, and working incredibly long days. If a junior associate works hard and succeeds, he or she rises in the firm. But teachers can’t progress past the junior associate level without leaving the classrooms they love. In other words, to teach for thirty years means to be a junior associate for thirty years – a daunting task to say the least.