On teaching while introverted.

Teaching: Not for Introverts https://t.co/61P4qm5Ddq

— Jordan Shapiro (@jordosh) January 26, 2016

When I saw the tweet above, I started thinking and tweeting aggressively; I'm going to try to transfer that energy here.

​I read both articles at The Atlantic—"Why Introverted Teachers are Burning Out" (January 25 2016) and "When Schools Overlook Introverts" (September 28 2015)—and found myself both affirmed and discouraged: affirmed because it was nice to see that other people might also see introverts' struggles with the highly social environments encouraged by 21st Century Eduucation, and discouraged because I was hoping these thoughts would continue to simmer below the surface of my daily consciousness—and disappear there.

​I understand that personality labels are merely shorthand, but I share a lot of characteristics attributable to introverts. Generally, although I can be social I need time to recharge on my own; I get overwhelmed by large, continuous, unpredictable social situations. At a recent counselling appointment, when I told my counselor that I'm an introvert, she looked at me and said, "How can you be an introvert and keep yourself going in so many social situations?" I told her that I generally like people and that I generally see the good in people, that I can coast and improvise skilfully, and that I take care of myself through the day. As far as introverts go, I'm OK at bouncing between social situations and antisocial ones.

But introversion has led me to second-guess my decision to be a teacher. It's a lot of talking all day long and the performance gets tiresome. There are plenty of days when I don't really have a chance to recharge and I fall further and further behind. By the time I get home, I'm shutting down and using avoidance and emotional withdrawal tactics with my own family. And that's not good.

In the meantime, education is heading down a path of individualization. As a participant in the education system with introverted characteristics, these are some of my concerns:

1. Collaboration is a corporate model, but not necessarily the best for learning. Sure, corporate culture likes to claim the values of "collaboration" and "synthesis," but these systems are not always the most effective. Just because you collaborate does not mean your end result will be better, or your individual results will improve. It's hard to measure collaboration; are you assessing the student's ability to collaborate or their ability to learn the content? And as a professional teacher, does collaboration waste more time than the learning it's intended to foster? Introverts don't tend to collaborate so often; should we expect that they will? And just because the corporate world currently sees "collaboration" as a value does not mean that it's the model to emulate.
2. Not all teachers can teach collaboratively. If you are determined to make collaboration the foremost model in the teaching system, what do you do with the teachers who are really crummy at collaborating? It's not that they don't want to teach, nor do they have bad relationships with any student or staff member--but the collaborative model of learning might simply clash with their personality so much that it's a detriment to have them try to teach it. Nothing sucks more than inauthenicity from authority figures, and you can't necessarily expect these non-collaborative teachers to be able to "fake it until they make it." I like collaborating, but I'm not certain if I can teach it.
3. If you want to individualize to make room for introverts, the entire system needs an overhaul. This is a usual no-brainer for me. As an education system, it's simply too much to try to juggle individualization, marks-based evaluation, exams, content areas, and the like. There are just too many systems in play. And introverts, who need their space to recharge, will never be comfortable if they don't know if they're expected to break down the system or master it.
4. Calls for increased student feedback are destructive to introverts' needs to recharge. This may seem minor, but it takes a lot of social energy for introverted teachers to write meaningful comments on all students' work. They are considering too many things in their head, too many angles by which to assess the product.

These are just a few of the concerns I have about introversion and teaching.

Every lunch break, I spend most of my time in my classroom. At the school where I teach, the school culture doesn't really expect students to skip out on their lunch to get work done, but I like to tell people that I stay in my classroom because I want to be available for students anyhow. However, after 15 minutes or so, if no students show up, I usually close my door and keep to myself. I have had many different extroverted staff members at multiple schools ask why they so rarely see me in the staff room; I tell them it's my recharging time.

But with all the demands of teaching in schools today, I can't help but feel like it's not enough--like a lonely lunch break is just not enough for me to make it through the day.

So when I see articles like these, I feel a little less alone. And perhaps I can squeeze a few more years out of this career despite my incessant introversion. But I have somewhat high hopes that the increased individualization and destruction of classroom-based models might make more room for introverts like myself. Perhaps, beneath the rubble of the archaic content-area-based system, I and fellow introverts will find a place where we can master our learning and recharge our batteries appropriately. 

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Although The Atlantic maintains an excellent online archive, I made a couple PDFs of the articles for reference.

• "Why Introverted Teachers are Burning Out"
• "When Schools Overlook Introverts"