If I find an author whose work I enjoy, I make it a goal to read all of their books. Alexandra Robbins is one of those writers. Ever since Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities, I’ve been hooked on the combination of following several people in depth and separate sections full of plenty of relevant facts that are the hallmark of Robbins’ style. The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession is no exception to this rule.
The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession by Alexandra Robbins
The Teachers follows three educators throughout the school year, all protected under pseudonyms. Penny is a middle-school math teacher who’s dealing with some personal stuff, including an abusive husband that she leaves towards the beginning of the school year. Some of the other teachers on her team, including her leader, are bullies, making her the target of their aggressions. Rebecca, a teacher at a different school, struggles to balance her personal and professional life, with her career often taking over, leaving her personal life in the dust.
Unlike Penny’s school situation, Rebecca’s co-workers seem to get along with her, and she has a very supportive principal. Finally, there’s Miguel, a special ed teacher at a school that the district wants to turn into a charter school, even though the current one serves a mostly minority population. Miguel is tired of not getting the assistance that he needs in his classroom, and almost decides to hang up his “teaching hat” by the end of the school year.
The book is broken up into chapters, one for each month of the school year. Each spends some time with the teachers, individually, of course, and includes plenty of additional information that Robbins gleaned from other interviews with teachers, research, and some first-hand knowledge, because she ends up working as a long-term substitute for a local school.
Obviously, things have changed a bit in the 20-plus years that I’ve been out of high school. Teachers now have to deal with emails from parents at all hours of the day, as well as place assignment grades online in a platform that the parents can access (hence the emails.)
Things have gotten even more fraught due to government policies that mandate additional standardized testing, and even fund schools based on those test scores. (Even more messed up is the fact that schools that perform badly on these tests get less funding, when it’s clear that they’re the ones that need the money most.
But, I digress. The Teachers is an eye-opening look at the profession as it is today, post-pandemic. Teachers not only have to ensure that they’re teachings their students the material, but they also have to give students the support and skills that they need to grow into successful adults. They have to act as counselors, on top of everything else, even when they’re overloaded with classes, can’t take days off due to having to pay substitutes out of pocket (at some schools), all with unfair levels of pay and a lack of support from the administration.
Robbins’ book makes it clear that something needs to change in the profession, and those changes need to happen soon.
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