image from Business Insider India (?!)
I have some thoughts about another article that, like the article I looked at last week, discusses the way medical professionals are viewing their jobs in the new generation. It’s a new verse of a song I have been singing for a very long time:
It’s the job vs. calling dilemma.
As a very good student, I had tons of choices as to what my career would be. By the time I was halfway through my 20s, I knew I was going to make my career in public education. There were some false starts (most notably, an abortive attempt at an MFA in poetry), but once I did my two years in the Teach for America program–two years for another post, perhaps, albeit one I likely will choose not to write–I knew this was what I wanted to do. When I reflect as to why, there are two big reasons.
One is, quite simply, that I love school. I have always loved school. My experience as a sixth grade teacher with TFA when I was barely old enough to drink taught me that I enjoyed school as a teacher every bit as much as I enjoyed it as a student. An opportunity to spend my entire life in a sacred and beautiful space such as a classroom was too attractive not to do.
But there was something more, something that I carry with me through to today:
This was incredibly important work. Teaching is so crucial that I can’t screw it up. It forces me to be at my best, day in and day out. I love that feeling—the urgency and intensity of it. I can’t understate the way that impacted my choice to dedicate my life to teaching (and, now, to teachers).
My dad says that he remembers (correctly!) warning me that I’d never have a ton of money if I taught. I don’t remember the conversation, but he says I told him that it didn’t matter to me. Most days, it doesn’t. (Some days, like when I look at my kids’ college funds, it does.)
I think this means I have always viewed teaching–and, for the past six school years, instructional coaching–as a calling rather than as a J-O-B. I love this gig and love heading to work every day. It’s challenging and critical, and I can’t come up with a better combination than that.
But when I read the words of Dr. Duaa AbdelHameid in the transcript of this podcast, I am reminded of why this is so problematic. Dr. AbdelHameid points out the way that “but it’s a calling” is used to guilt-trip doctors into enduring some less-than-ideal treatment.
I think people have different levels of tolerance, but I think there is a baseline certain amount of discomfort that you should be expecting in medicine, and people know that coming in. But then I think things change when you actually experience it, because it’s uncomfortable, it doesn’t feel good, it feels awful. And so why should I be feeling like this if it’s just a job? So I really think it comes back to this job–calling thing. If this is just a job, I don’t need to be dealing with this. But if it’s my calling, then there’s a lot more discomfort that I’m going to put up with, because I feel moved by something much deeper than my paycheck.
On the one hand, since doctors’ paychecks have commas on them that teachers’ paychecks do not, I feel like it’s a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison. Almost all doctors are quite well-compensated for the “amount of discomfort” that “feels awful” in medicine. As the son and brother-in-law of a doctor, I greatly respect and to some extent understand that discomfort, and know that the difficulties and secondary traumas teachers face are not in the same league of those that doctors face. Nevertheless, when the day is over, doctors get to drive nicer cars to nicer homes than teachers do. There’s something of tacit contract at play there: we view the job as both difficult and important, so it is well-compensated.
But in every other way, “this job-calling thing” is exactly what teachers go through. When teachers hear “this job-calling thing,” it is almost always used to justify those smaller teacher paychecks.
One argument used against increasing teacher pay was that it would somehow decrease teacher quality. The idea is that we don’t want our kid’s teacher to become a teacher “for the wrong reasons.” To ensure that our kid’s teacher is focused entirely on the job at hand, and not just biding time thinking of money we need to make sure that the teacher is making as little money as possible, sort of like the priesthood. By reducing the money that a teacher makes, we can ensure they are in it for the kids and not to make a living.
I remain curious as to whether the same people making this brainless argument ensure that, when their kid needs surgery, they shop around for the surgeon, anesthesiologist, and nurses that are making very little money and charging bargain-basement rates. Shouldn’t they, too, become doctors “for the right reasons”?
The history of this argument, I think, is a richly sexist one. Since educators have been (and remain) disproportionately female, the work of educators has been less valued. And since a woman who wants to make what they are worth has always been dangerous, a way to prevent that desire to make a fair living has always been to shame educators who ask for what they are worth by accusing them of failing to truly care about the kids they teach.
False dilemma alert! As a good doctor can both value their patients and prefer having more money to having less, so can a good teacher. We can value both the money that a job brings and the soul-feeding satisfaction that a calling brings. Teaching is both a job AND a calling (a floor wax AND a dessert topping).
What does this mean to me as a coach?
I’ve already told you that it is hugely important to me to know what my teachers value. In the process of asking my teachers The Big Values Question, I have found that almost all of them have some degree of calling that brings them to work every day. There are rare–I’d say less than 5%--exceptions: people who somehow fell into teaching because they never found another thing to do, people who have lost the passion they once felt as a calling and now are riding out the string, or (more commonly) people whose calling is coaching sports who use teaching as a convenient means to that end. Each of these professionals can be good teachers and can be brought in touch with their values in the classroom.
But it’s far easier to coach a teacher through their soul, which means that a professional who finds that teaching is a calling is far easier to coach. When the job gets difficult–when, as Dr. AbdelHameid says, the job “isn’t comfortable, doesn’t feel good, it feels awful,” I like to ask moments that bring them back into that calling–which is so closely tied to their values. What will it look like when they succeed at wading through the troubled water? What is it that makes this all worth it to them, and how can we make tomorrow closer to that feeling than a tough today was?
That’s a good place to start rebuilding when the day is the Jay Oh Bee-est of Jay Oh Bee days.
Anyhow–what’s your thinking? How does calling one’s occupation a job or a calling impact the way we teach and coach?