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?

TMAO outlines what aren’t his reasons for leaving the game, which include inadequate support, inadequate compensation, and basically anyone’s pet explanation for his attrition. He then explains:

I’m not happy unless I’m being the teacher I see in my head, but the process of finding that guy and living as him no longer makes me happy.

You all realize the only solution to this conundrum is a lobotomy, right? I don’t know how many teachers have played in the intersection of hard work and creativity for TMAO’s sustained stretch but year after year in that place, from my limited experience, the work eases up, the returns diminish, but the latter outstrips the former.

Foreshadowing from TMAO last May:

The cool thing I did to boost achievement is still a cool thing that effectively boosts achievement, but the seventh time through felt a little less cool than the sixth time, which felt a little less cool than the fifth, which felt a little less cool than… and it’s not always about me, but it has to be a little about me, too.

I hate to eulogize a writer who is obviously still writing but lemme just say that, while so many bloggers content themselves (eg.) debating Del.icio.us and Diigo ad nauseum, TMAO has been a rare fount of professional development in my reader, a writer focused intently on the classroom, on the issues facing the classrooms which rarely receive even lip service from the most heavily trafficked blogs.

He has been the bard of the new teacher experience for three years running and, if he is finished writing as well as teaching, I have no idea where to find the same stuff on tap.

Related:

The job won’t save you.

Lester Freamon, to Jimmy McNulty, from The Wire, a show which seems like an unfortunately apt touchstone right here. The excerpted clip is NSFW but, if you click through, try to resist the connection.

Benjamin Baxter, if you haven’t met, is a student teacher who pulls few punches. His criticism of his consulting teacher and of school policy is a matter of public record, however pseudonymous. In light of that, his recent post jangles the nerves a bit:

The Cobbler looked me over, and started leading me out of the door. Then he said:

“Can I borrow you for a minute or two? […] We, the department, are aware that you’re blogging.”

Advice, reassurances, and offers of employment are all welcome, I’m sure, at Baxter’s blog.

TMAO’s out. Can’t begrudge him the decision at all but, really, what a shame.