John: A good friend of mine, Nancy Alloway, has been a teacher for all her career, and she’s going to be talking about her own and her fellow teachers’ anxieties. Let me start off by asking Nancy to give you just a thumbnail sketch of her career. Where did you teach?

Nancy: So I taught for 35 years in public and private schools in the United States and I taught 1st through 5th grade. I enjoyed my teaching very much.

John: Thank you. I wonder if you could tell me about the kinds of things teachers typically are concerned about these days. Make a distinction between reasonable worries like the school not having enough money to do what it wants to do and anxieties which are fears that are probably exaggerated or not entirely true. When you think about your fellow teachers, what are some of the major things that they’re concerned about that would probably count as anxieties?

Nancy: I think most of the teachers that I have worked with would say that the emphasis on testing creates a lot of anxiety among the teachers, the students, and the administrators. I think that testing is one of the things that bring out maybe the worst in people because we’re all trying to do the best for our students but when that means testing, prep, and examining past years test scores and looking at improvements and so much emphasis on the data, I think that that’s a very big anxiety producer, especially among young teachers.

John: I’m not surprised to hear that. I was reading in a report the other day that something like 150 teachers in a southern major city were fired because they were caught changing the responses on the test and the superintendent, as I was reading the article at least, had been the supervisor of the year nationally the year before and this year she’s going to jail because she helped the teachers change the results. What occurred to me is that if I were a 45-year-old teacher with a master’s degree and I’ve got one of those classes that just aren’t working very well and my students do very poorly on the state exams, I could be fired for that. I suddenly realized that if I were fired at 45 with a master’s degree in education, I not only probably wouldn’t get a white-collar job, but I couldn’t get a blue-collar job either. I probably would be unhirable. That’s a very scary kind of thing because suppose I have the standard two kids and a family. What do I do about it? So I could see why teachers would be worried about that. One of the things I want to talk to you about is that I volunteered at Nancy’s class for some lengthy time because I wanted to learn about 4th graders and what kinds of things made them nervous and what made them edgy. One of the first things I noticed in Nancy’s classroom is that the teacher’s chair was piled high with books and teaching materials and Nancy never sat down the whole time. Why is that Nancy?

Nancy: Well I didn’t sit down because I was always interacting with students. I think any good teacher does that. In 4th grade, kids are moving around and I was moving around with them and I wasn’t the kind of teacher who ever sat at my desk. During independent reading, for example, I would go conference with individual kids and any other time that they were working independently I was interacting with a small group or someone so I sat at a table with students but I never sat at my desk when students were in a classroom.

John: I want to go back to the new teachers’ anxiety for a moment. Can you think of other things that they were nervous about besides the testing? What other concerns would new teachers have?

Nancy: I think in any high-pressure school system the concern with the way parents interact with the teachers and the pressure that parents put on teachers is pretty immense and until you learn how to listen and understand and take time to not be defensive and learn how to control that until you learn to get some of those skills under your belt, it’s very very intimidating for young teachers.

John: You just said one of the words that certainly occurs to me and that’s defensiveness. When I was a kid if you came home and said, “the teacher hit me,” you’d probably get hit again because the teacher was God in the classroom and whatever the teacher said was the case, they believed. That’s not true anymore, is it?

Nancy: No, I don’t think so. I think that parents have anxieties and that build up on wanting their kid to be the best and to do the right thing and to be the best student and that sometimes comes across as really pushing teachers to do things with the kids that they either aren’t ready for or is just not something that is done in the school. For example, in the high power system that I taught in, there were students who were really doing all kinds of math outside the school so when they came into 4th grade, they weren’t in a position to understand the way we were teaching math. Parents didn’t believe in it so there was a lot of pressure on teachers to instead of extend what they were learning but to add more to onto the students’ plate and I think i learned to handle that by talking and listening and trying to explain the philosophy and what we were doing and how I was extending creative ways of doing math with kids. But a new teacher has a lot of trouble making that statement because they don’t have a lot of experience working with that kind of parents that really are pushy. They always want the best for their kid and I can really understand that but as a teacher, you often sometimes see the child in a different light and sometimes that light is that there’s a lot of anxiety on some kids that are really pushed in any area.

John: I know that the two major areas that students get tested in and therefore you get tested in, in a way, is language arts skills and what is now called STEM. One thing that I’ve heard about from a number of sources is the time you and your class started a pretzel manufacturing unit You researched how to make the pretzels, and you made the dough, you shaped them, you put salt on them, you baked them, you packaged them, and then you had them figure out who you were going to sell them to and how you were going to sell them. Then you had to give a report to the superintendent of schools. They don’t let you do that anymore, do they?

Nancy: Well, I haven’t been teaching lately and I think the last 10 years - even 15 years ago they started the board of health idea that kids would make something in school, even though we were really really careful about cleanliness, I think there were probably reasons that’s true, but it was a fantastic learning experience and kids loved it. We sold stock in the company and I had kids come back and tell me 10 years later that they went into business because they really liked making money in the pretzel company. What we did was we earned the money but I said as the CEO that you had to figure out a way to give some of this money back. So we would come to the consensus where we would put this money for a good social action cause. And it was really kind of fun and kids learned a lot and they loved it and they loved school. We did a lot of it before school but some of it happened in school hours too.

John: This sort of brings us over to the anxiety that the administrators feel because I couldn’t agree with you more, that sounds like such a wonderful idea but because they’re only testing in what we used to call English and Mathematics, those are the two big subjects for teaching - and science too, I suppose. Then the superintendents and principals are not going to want you to do such a broad-brushed activity because it’s not clear how that’s going to show up on the test and I think that’s too bad.

Nancy: Yeah, I agree with you.

John: Can you think of anything that you yourself had to deal with in terms of anxiety. Was there anything special that made you nervous in your years of teaching?

Nancy: Well, I know that there are some teachers who can go home and stop thinking about students, and I really had a hard time doing that. If I had a child who had special needs or was really bright but wasn’t performing or I didn’t quite understand what was going on with them, sometimes those kids would really make me lose sleep because I would wake up thinking about them and then I couldn’t go back to sleep so I think that was an anxiety that was probably stronger when I was younger but definitely became something I would think about. And of course, if you had parents with situations that were difficult I think that sometimes caused anxiety just thinking about “what do I do?” and “how do I handle this situation?” I really do think I got better at that as I had more experience.

John: Okay. Well, as I told you before we’re trying to keep these interviews between 10 and 15 minutes and we’re about at that point right now so I’m going to release you. So thank you so much for participating in this and I hope you come back and talk to us again sometime.

Nancy: Of course, John. My pleasure.