If I have to convince, what should I argue? And to who? With what reasons?

In my arguing to inquire paper, I tried to understand teacher identity. As a model, I tried to use Hochschild’s concept of the true and false selves, to see if her model really could relate to teachers. Some say no, not at all; others say yes, but with qualifiers. In the end, I came to conclude that, by and large, Hochschild’s ideas of true/false selves and emotion work do apply to teachers, just in different ways and to a different extent than it does in some of the service professions. Then, in the inquiry paper I also tried to look at how conflicts between the true and false selves, and the stress of performing emotion work/labor can be detrimental to a teacher’s true emotions and true self, and who this could contribute to teacher burnout rates, which in the U.S. are extraordinarily high, and in some districts where student drop out rates are high, teachers still “drop out” more often than students do. Perhaps we are not completely blind to this fact: after all, I have always wanted to teach, but knew that it would be emotionally challenging. This is one of the reasons that Teach for America appealed to me: I could leave after my two year commitment without having to look down at the ground and feel like a failure who succumbed to the stress of being a high school teacher, but instead could say I made a difference, and I didn’t leave because I couldn’t handle it, but because my time was up and it was time to move on.


So, that’s my background info. Hope you enjoyed it. I will probably first have to re-prove that teachers emotionally manage their emotions…can knock off a few of the required sources right there ;). Now onto the main point of this blog. What do I want to argue in my Arguing to Convince paper?

I think that I would like to argue that teacher education needs to perhaps stop focusing solely on the emotional management of students, but start working on building teacher identity so that new teachers don’t go into the profession and get burned out so quickly. I believe that if teacher training programs focus on emotions at all, it is probably about how to address a student’s emotional needs. Teachers are expected to be these amazing, philanthropic, hard-working people who are strong and don’t need emotional support: but if they are getting burned out, obviously they do!

If I made this argument, I believe my audience would be teacher educators or prospective teachers who don’t want to take even more time in the classroom and need to get out in the classroom. These people may argue that becoming a teacher already requires 4 years of education and that teachers can’t learn how to manage their emotions in the classroom, that they need to practice in the real world.

Or, perhaps I could argue that schools need to start focusing less on memorization and test scores and instead start focusing on real learning. With the No Child Left Behind act, schools now have to perform assessment tests much more often, and when schools don’t perform up to standards, they actually have to inform parents that they have the right to find a better school, or the school can even be closed down. This only adds to the stress of teachers, and as studies have shown, this blatant memorization of facts for performance exams actually jeopardizes the learning environment because kids aren’t learning critical thinking skills, they are learning how to memorize and pass tests (I would use my developmental psychology book and online articles I have for sources). I fear that this may be hard to tie into teacher identity, but maybe not (I do have some sources that link it it…read below about UK system).

In this case, I believe my audience would be those who develop laws and testing schedules and believe that the only way to assess student performance is by analyzing test scores. I would argue to them that these tests are not only bad for students’ learning since it inhibits them and makes those who are at the bottom of the scale feel inadequate and hopeless, but also that it makes teachers standardize classroom instruction, use fake emotion, become emotionally mismanaged, and hurts the teacher-student relationship.

Now, I don’t know much about the teacher education system, so I may find that programs in fact do work with emotion management and not letting the classroom psychologically injure the teacher’s self-concept. Therefore, this weekend for Fall Break, one of my objectives is to ask my cousin who has a Master’s degree in elementary school education what her training experiences have been. Has she been taught to emotionally manage the self, or just to manage the student? Does she think that such programs would be helpful? I believe she would be able to provide great insight into this topic.

Also, I think I would make the argument that if we want teachers to manage their students and make a lasting impact on the lives of their students that the teachers have to first be confident in their selves. After all, a teacher who is overwhelmed by their emotional conflicts will become disconnected from their class and not have much of a lasting impact on the students. For this argument, I have a source that states that when teachers in the UK switched from more philanthropic work to surface acting like Hochschild type work that they became disconnected, burnt out, and I believe it said that many ended up leaving the profession. This would be evidence that emotion management not only comes in many forms, but when teachers aren’t trained to properly manage their emotions in a changing classroom that teachers become disconnected, which means their students feel it too. Additionally, if I decided to argue that we need to stop stressing tests and start emphasizing learning, this article would definitely tie into that argument as well. This would be anecdotal evidence.

For one of my reasons that this argument is relevant, I would not only quote the statistics that say that teacher turnover is high, but cite the resources that show how expensive it is to keep replacing teachers when they leave (which kind of makes me question Teach for America (TFA), but since their turnover rates in low-income communities are similar to non-TFA teachers in the same regions, maybe they aren’t really hurting the system, although they may). In fact, I think it costs somewhere around $20,000 more for a teacher to be replaced than it is to keep the old teacher on staff. Why this is true, I’m not sure, but I think it’s worth exploring further. This would be expert opinion and hard evidence.

I do see some problems with my argument, like how can this be done? After all, is emotional management in the class something that can really be taught? For flight attendants, I think one of my articles explained that indeed it can be done. People in this profession are taught how to manage their emotions when others share anecdotes and ideas for emotional management. For instance, one of the research articles I read shared that in one flight attendant training program, a story of a flight attendant with an unruly, rude, irate customer kept their calm, but let that person “get to them.” They weren’t emotionally managing their self! However, that person found out at the end of the flight that the person’s son had just died and he was flying to his son’s funeral. Now that flight attendant always emotionally manages their self and doesn’t allow their true self to emotionally react to the situation because the person who is being rude to them may just be having a bad day. In low income communities, teachers may be able to do something similar, allowing themselves to say that maybe the student acts out in class because their parents don’t give them enough attention, not because the teacher is boring or ineffective. Through training programs where teacher would have to suppress their emotions and learn how harmful it can be, and learning to understand that everyone comes from a different background and may come from a stressed out family that isn’t supportive, warm, and loving that they shouldn’t take the comments or actions of their students personal, because they are not really directed at them per se, but more are inner directed feelings that the student can’t control anymore and must direct them at someone else to relieve their internal stress. Perhaps for my arguing paper I should just argue that teachers need to be taught emotion management though, and not how the system should teach them this. Perhaps the “how” should be left for the persuasive paper. What do you (YES, YOU, THE PERSON WHO IS READING THIS BLOGBrett will give you an imaginary smiley face sticker if you comment, I’m pretty sure… you should do it!) think?