TMAO:

What gets me going is the pursuit of exponential student growth, and what keeps me coming back for more is the chance to hack away at the intensely complex pursuit of that growth. What stymies me, what blunts me, is the unraveling and solving of this particular puzzle. When the work becomes less about discovery and innovation and more about delivery and application, when the achievement becomes less shocked success and more the expected norm, when the cool thing you did to dramatically accelerate progress still accelerates progress but becomes less cool every time you do it, further and further removed from the spark-joy of innovation… I start checking for exits.

TMAO isn’t another canary in this coal mine of new teacher attrition. His kind needs an entirely different prescription. Ordinarily, I’d close comments and send you over to Room D2, but I’ve gotta ask the question here:

Where, in the vast sphere of education, do you deploy someone like TMAO, someone who is more satisfied by instructional innovation than by instructional implementation? How do you play to that teacher’s strengths? How do you keep him challenged?

‘Cause I can’t see it.

John August’s advice to new, improving teachers screenwriters:

My advice for you is to dedicate one day a week to disassembling good movies. Take existing films (and one-hour dramas) and break them down to cards. Think of yourself as an ordinary mechanic given the task of reverse-engineering a spaceship. Figure out what the pieces do, and why they were put together in that way.

What was that thing you were saying about the intangible art of teaching?

Whatever I am as a teacher, I am a hyper-observant hack, stitching together the best I see around me, trimming back the brush. None of what you see here comes naturally.

To be fair to the teaching-as-calling crowd, August also writes:

If you were writing in for advice about how to be funnier or more charismatic, I would have probably let your email sit in the growing folder of unanswerable questions, because those are pretty much inherent qualities. [emph. added]

Which begs the question: what qualities of a teacher are inherent?