by guest blogger, Nancy Wang. Nancy just finished her first year with the UCLA Graduate Teacher’s Program. She taught AP Language and English Comp at a high school in Compton, Los Angeles.

Having just finished one school year in a teaching program that strongly emphasizes reflection, I have spent many long commutes thinking about my identity and my goals as an aspiring urban educator.  After five months of planning lessons, grading papers, and pushing, challenging, demanding, coaxing, cajoling students to work and to learn, I am no master teacher, but I think I have at least gained some insight into the novice teacher experience.

One aspect of teaching that I have spent some time in reflection is the issue of teacher motivation.  I am not talking about the goals and philosophies that, as aspiring teachers, we articulated for our various applications and interviews, but the inner desires that drive our day-by-day teaching decisions.

See if any of these teaching “goals” resonate with you:

• Be every student’s favorite teacher
• Be seen as a “cool” teacher
• Have every student tell you how much you changed their lives
• Gain the ardent admiration of your fellow teachers and the administration
• Lose the ardent admiration of your fellow teachers and the administration because they fear your brilliance and passion
• Work yourself half to death, only to come back and have all of your students score ridiculously high on some standardized test, regaining everyone’s ardent admiration
• Then, of course, have a movie made about you

As silly as these goals might sound when explicitly stated, I think many novice teachers, myself included, implicitly and instinctively gravitate towards them as the benchmarks of urban schooling success.  After a semester of student teaching, I have realized how frequently I fall into the trap of the above pattern of thinking, guiding my teaching decisions by popularity rather than principles.

For example, my own inconsistency lies at the root of any difficulties with classroom management.  While part of the cause of being “too soft” on students comes from a desire to be kind, if I am completely honest with myself, the deeper reason is that I do not want their resentment.  However, if I truly cared for them and sought their best, I would firmly hold them accountable for their actions, even if they misunderstand and resent me.  Another example of how we can neglect principle for popularity is the issue of trust.  Sure, we all want our students to trust us, but what are we more concerned about, that we have our students’ trust, or that we are trustworthy?

Last summer, The Washington Post published an insightful Op-Ed piece entitled, “Schools Need Teachers Like Me. I Just Can’t Stay.” (August 9, 2009).  In this column, the author admits that she went into teaching because, like many others, she had “fallen in love with the idea of the job.”  She writes, “Urban classrooms struck me as seductively gritty.”  Four years after she began teaching, she was ready to leave the profession.  In her astute analysis of why teacher turnover is so high, especially for young, eager recruits, she writes:

“…[S]ociologists Neil Howe and William Strauss characterize the members of my generation as “engaged,” “upbeat” and “achievement-oriented.” This is why we become teachers. We seek to challenge ourselves, and we excel at pursuing our goals. Howe and Strauss go so far as to call us a “hero generation.” Our engagement also explains why we are leaving the classroom. We are not used to feeling consistently defeated and systemically undervalued.” (emphasis added)

This quote is a sobering reminder of the danger of those unspoken aspirations, where the end goal is my own glory and not my students’ good.  So as I anticipate my first year of full-time teaching (that is, once California starts hiring teachers again), I will enter the profession with this conviction—to be guided by principles, not popularity, to teach not for societal accolades, but for the One who will ultimately say to me, “Well done.”