Cats are cute :D

Even the small plants and baby trees in my terrace garden know it is autumn. They shake themselves gently in the breeze and shed those ripe leaves. These attention seekers invite me to interact with them through the clean-up routine. They enjoy my signing and the conversations I have with them (thank goodness, they're the only ones who do). The result is a clean terrace! Does the job of cleaning have any effect on the doer? It sure does.

And so does teaching. "Teaching, like any truly human activity, emerges from one's inwardness, for better or worse," wrote Parker J. Palmer. It also has a profound impact on the person who practices it. Occupational moulding is the impact of an occupation on the person who does it. It affects teachers as much as any other professional. Teaching unleashes a boomerang that unswervingly comes back to the teacher; it impacts them. But unlike other professionals, the teacher never gets to see a vivid result of their work. For example, a surgeon or a gardener witnesses the effect of their effort quickly and in measurable terms. How do you measure the impact of teachers and their teaching? That tough question is central to many professional ordeals of teachers.

Despite all the noble world view on teaching, teachers' personal opinions on the subject unfailingly highlight the mundane, ordinary routine moments that unfold in their everyday lives, pushing them into despair. This is true even of people who come into this profession enthused by passion and high ideals of changing the world. They lose themselves somewhere, overwhelmed by this routine, and feel powerless and confounded. Except for the grades, there's no precise measure to act as an extrinsic motivator for this group. That adds to the woes.

This despair comes through when you hold sincere conversations with teachers. In a conversation that I had with a public school teacher in a single teacher school, she talked about how teaching under a roof that could collapse any time, coupled with unreasonable demand for better school results, paralyzed her most of the time. Her long everyday commute added extra effect to this stress. All she could do was repeat a set of seemingly insignificant things over and over again, but also thought it was gross injustice to the students.

With so many back-breaking moments in teaching – kids unable to sit still for even a moment, the emotional baggage they bring from their homes, far-from-reality administrators, and low status in society – teachers frequently go through emotions like anger, loneliness, frustration, and guilt.

Micro-moments of joy

But then, what saves the teachers? What keeps those who choose to stay in the profession tied to it?

It is those moments that Sam Intrator aptly calls "spots of time that glow" - when out of the mundane appears a deep connection and meaning inside the classroom. An insight illuminates the teacher when she realizes that teaching is the art of changing the brain, making her an emotional link between the student and the subject.

Daniel P. Liston, a professor of education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, goes a little further to the awe-filled yet fleeting moments that can save teachers from hitting the void. He talks about combating despair with love for teaching and learning. When learning becomes a real part of teachers' lives, it can breathe fresh energy into them. It can add more meaning to what they do. New and enriching knowledge can give them transformative power and steer them gently towards their students and away from desolation.

In conclusion, we can say that without being able to measure their impact, it is tough for teachers to keep their motivation and love towards their profession. All those quotes and rewards become meaningless and unsustainable. The feeling of despair is so real for them, but one can beat it only through deep connections they make inside their classrooms and with learning itself. They have to combat it with supreme optimism of the human spirit.