There are many teachers who feel unhappy, a recent poll by Gallup tells us that unhappy teachers miss an estimated 2.3 million more work days than those who are happy with their job. 

But why do teachers feel so bad? Educator Ellie Herman shares her thoughts in a blog post featured in an article on WashingtonPost.com. Herman, once a writer/producer for television shows, turned to teaching in 2007. In 2013, Herman left the classroom and spent a year visiting classrooms and recording her findings in her blog, Gatsby in L.A., according to the article. 

In her recent post, Herman offers educators tips on how to recognize "bad teacher self-doubt" and how teachers can help with this "epidemic."

So I f it’s safe to assume from the sampling of my readers that there are a lot of teachers out there agonizing that they are not good teachers, I think we can also assume that those teachers are unlikely to stay in the classroom because nobody is going to stay for too long in a job at which they feel incompetent," she wrote. "If in fact those teachers are right and they are bad, and yet they care enough about their jobs to be searching for answers in the middle of the night, what are we as an educational system doing to support those teachers so that they can become better?

Her first "thought" is that "teacher training is pathetically inadequate."

New teachers need specific training and support depending on their community, the size of their classrooms and the age and proficiency level of their students. Nothing I ever learned in my training prepared me for dealing with large classes of students who were several years below grade level, many of whom had difficulty controlling their behavior in class. It took me two years to learn it on my own, every day a trial and error. Right now, our system pretty much makes teachers learn it on their own; the current “student teaching” system pairs a student teacher with a random assortment of whatever teacher is willing to host them, regardless of whether that teacher is any good or teaches in a community like the one that new teacher will soon face. Every new teacher should spend a year in the classroom of a master teacher in the community where he or she plans to teach.

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Article by Kassondra Granata, Education World Contributor