Teachers are quitting in droves. Here’s why I’m not one of them

When I was starting out as a teacher, just over a decade ago, I knew that only half of my new colleagues would stick with it for five years. It felt like a white-knuckled ride on a roller-coaster in those early days, as I worried about whether I could beat those odds.

New teachers are still struggling, according to a recent survey by the Australian Education Union, “with 39 per cent planning to leave the profession within a decade”. A few weeks ago, I was in the staff room with a few other teachers who had clocked up several decades, and we were musing about why and how we were still in the profession.

My job is to teach my students, but I learn from them as well.

One of my colleagues who worked for four decades, then retired but still regularly pops in for contract and casual teaching roles, said that teaching was her “fountain of youth”. By working with young people, she kept up with trends and was feeling spritely. As proof, she wiggled her legs out from under the table and showed us vibrant purple stockings that matched her scarf.

Teaching has been invigorating for me as well, but in a different way. For me, it is a career that has allowed me to be my true self, a privilege I never experienced in previous jobs.

In a classroom with teenagers, there are no coded messages, no doublespeak, no hidden meanings. What you see is what you get. A teenager is in a state of becoming, and in that state, they are completely, and beautifully, authentic. I never have to guess what a student is thinking or feeling; it is there on their face, in their body language, and in their words.

And as a result, over my 11 years as a teacher, I, too, have acquired a state of complete and utter honesty. I do not hide my emotions, feelings or thoughts. On yard duty recently, in an area by the portables we have dubbed Lover’s Lane, I saw two teenagers entwined, and the thought bubble protruded from my head: “Oh, no. You’re traumatising everyone with your PDA!” The two students quickly ended their embrace. I realised it hadn’t just been a thought. “Did I say that out loud?” I said. “Sorry.” The students laughed good-heartedly, and I laughed with them.

These moments of shared understanding make me realise how special it is to spend most of my day as I truly am. That the more I play up my wacky personality and own my actions and feelings, the more I see my students do the same.

My mind searches back for the time before I became a teacher. The decades where I worked in administration, play-acting to a role of the corporate executive, wearing pencil skirts and pump heels, my make-up my armour, my real identity tightly bound and hidden under layers of paisley. Coming home with a mind hungry for stimulus and muscles craving movement.

Now I wear jeans and sweatshirts, my feet in comfy and colourful purple fur-lined sneakers, my face anointed with sunscreen moisturiser. At the end of the day, I go home seeking quiet from the constant stimulation, my muscles stretched and supple from constantly standing, walking and bending in the classroom.

I never question the meaning of my life and whether I am making an impact. I know because my students tell me. There was my year 7 class who threw me a surprise birthday party and then gave me a birthday card every year until they graduated. There are the students who seek me out for a chat when I’m out in the community and not their teacher. There are those whom I taught last year who tell me they miss me and want me to be their teacher again.

The more I talk to friends in other industries, the more I realise the privilege of my position. As a teacher, I am the adult in the room and the one who sets the barometer, and yet my students are my instructors, too. As I watch them strive in the process of becoming and shedding their self-consciousness as they step into themselves, I wish for them to find a pathway where they can be their authentic selves. A pathway where they don’t lose this beautiful honesty that they share with me.

And a part of my heart breaks because the world is moulding them into the shape they need to be to fit into it.

Amra Pajalic is a teacher of 11 years. She is the award-winning author of Sabiha’s Dilemma, Alma’s Loyalty and Jesse’s Triumph, the first three books in the young adult Sassy Saints series.

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