Generation Alpha Burnout
I’ve known I wanted to be a teacher since I was in the 2nd grade. The idea popped into my head when I was eight years old, and it never left. Something I can confirm about public education teachers is that they all go into teaching incredibly aware that the rest of their lives will consist of sitting in a classroom forever, getting paid nothing, and being completely underappreciated. Despite this, it’s worth it to them.
And that is why I commend anyone who is still employed in the educational system, because oh my gosh, I don’t know how you can still do it. Everything is a mess right now.
I took an elementary teacher’s aide position my freshman year of high school, and I loved it. The next year, COVID struck. The lack of classrooms meant I didn’t have a job, but I watched my 6-year-old sister play with toys over iPad-school on Zoom, and I watched her teacher trying her best (and failing miserably) to control 20 toddlers through a screen. I remember wondering how teaching young kids would change when we got back to school.
Oh boy.
The US has been facing a teacher shortage since 2015, but the number of teaching vacancies skyrocketed after COVID. The reasons for the shortage are pretty much attributed to teachers not being properly paid or appreciated for their work and leaving because of this, but COVID gave an entirely new meaning to this.
When the elementary school opened up again, I reclaimed my position as a summer school aide. Since so many teachers had already left, not only was every summer applicant hired regardless of their qualifications, but anyone with a college degree who applied was offered a teaching role. The teacher I worked with was 20 years old, and the school offered her practicum credit to take this role even though she applied as a paraprofessional, which is just a classroom supervisor. We were put in a rising third grade classroom.
This chaotic system almost could have worked. But we were dealing with children who were heavily raised by the internet– and not going to school– for two of their most important developmental years.
Before COVID, most teachers in my school would expect 1-3 kids with behavioral issues in their classrooms. After COVID, most kids came back with severe behavioral and other psychological issues. Our kids ran wild, and they weren’t responding to the methods that we were trained to use to handle them, methods that have been successful throughout previous years. Plus, the lack of teachers meant that we had to pack classrooms. As two practically teenage girls, we were in charge of 35 unruly kids.
But we got lucky. Down the hall, a third grade classroom run by a paraprofessional-turned-teacher was constantly in shambles. The kids were always running around, yelling, throwing things, tipping desks over and swearing at the teacher, while she spent the day praying for it to end. One day, this teacher called in sick minutes before the first bell rang, and the school never heard from her again. Her aide was forced to play movies all day because the administration couldn’t find an immediate replacement– all of the substitutes were already working.
Behavioral issues weren’t the only setback we faced. Since our kids were coming out of second grade, we began the summer by trying to introduce them to multiplication, which is standard third grade curriculum. What we, and the entire country were not prepared for, is that COVID set most kids back almost a full year in math and reading. Our students were hardly familiar with addition, while subtraction was basically a new concept to them, and they had never even heard of multiplication. The summer became dedicated to trying to catch these kids back up.
So I left.
My dream to teach didn’t die because kids ruined it for me. It faded because it was heartbreaking to see COVID’s take effect on early generation alpha. The world was not prepared for the repercussions it had on our youth, and the education system as a whole did not have the time, resources or knowledge about what was happening to figure out how to properly deal with it, nonetheless pay teachers enough to justify working in the setting. In 2021, when I applied for college, I made the decision to walk away from my lifelong dream, and hope that the system’s wounds can someday heal.