Stop Gaslighting Teachers: We Don’t Want to be Heroes

Why the toxic positivity of the “I teach for the outcome, not the income” mentality needs to die. Now.

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This is the start of my 16th year in public education. I’m one of the “lucky” ones: I teach in an affluent district, and I get paid better at my level of years of service and degrees earned than teachers with comparable credentials in other districts across my state.

That’s not a compliment, though. I certainly don’t teach for the money, and the comparison speaks to just how little some teachers out there get paid.

While no one teaches for the riches, we’d at least like to be compensated for the time and energy we do invest. Instead, teachers are constantly fed lines about how “teaching is a work of heart” or how we should “teach for the outcome, not the income.”

This toxic positivity around teaching has to stop.

Society gaslights teachers into pouring all of their waking hours into their jobs without financial compensation because we should “do it for the kids.” We’re being passive-aggressively bullied into giving everything we are at the expense of our mental and physical health and our relationships. We’re told to practice self-care, and then we’re given more “duties as assigned.”