Kem Smith, an English teacher at McCluer North High School, shared her thoughts and advice with St. Louis American readers in a story published in August about teacher and student anxieties as the 2022-23 school year opened.
“It feels different this year,” Smith explained. “Starting with not having to wear masks and not having to do hybrid classrooms. Those anxieties are gone but they’ve been replaced by other anxieties.”
She’s now helping educators others across the nation with an advice column for Chalkbeat [www.chalkbeat.org] called “After the Bell.”
More than half of teachers are considering quitting their jobs, according to a survey earlier this year from the National Education Association. Since 2020, an estimated 600,000 teachers have already left the profession as they face stress and staffing shortages that have worsened during the pandemic.
Smith told WBUR.org, a National Public Radio affiliate, she understands why teachers want to quit because, years ago, she did.
Smith’s interview highlights include:
On the need for an advice column
“There [are] so many layers to what we do on a day-to-day basis that oftentimes we can only talk to other teachers about what we do.”
On why she quit teaching after giving birth to her youngest son
“It was all too much trying to be a middle school teacher. And every middle school teacher understands you almost have to have, like, some type of special personality to be able to be everything that a middle schooler needs. And just take that and multiply it by …150 kids every day. And to be all of that for those students, and then have a little baby who you need to take care of, is just more than at that time I felt like I could handle.”
On why she came back to teaching
“Everything I did that wasn’t teaching, it kept being teaching. I had a business and people would come in and say, ‘Oh, this kind of feels like a classroom.’ It’s just, this becomes who you are. And so for me, I missed the calling. I missed the classroom.
On what advice teachers write to her for:
“Many times, it’s the new teacher and they’re trying to prepare … for what happens in the classroom. But you almost cannot until you are in this room with 35 kids looking at you. They’re not interested in your material. They’re interested in the other 35 kids who are around the room. They’re interested in what’s going on, on the Internet.
On addressing mental health:
“During the two years of virtual education … this was my first time actually experiencing what depression was like, going from my bedroom to the place in the house that was established for me [to teach]. Our students didn’t have to have their cameras on. So I just sat in front of a blank screen and tried to teach all day … And I did have one student at one point turn his camera on, and I was just like, wow, this is very distracting because I don’t know if maybe his mom had a home daycare because there were just children everywhere. And people live in different situations. And when school wasn’t there, I just didn’t have it.
“I did actually pursue and find a therapist that worked best for me, and I was able to vocalize and explain some of the things that I went through. Fortunately, the school was consistently working on a plan to bring us back in person, but even with bringing us back in person, there were so many people in my community who were dying, catching COVID and not being able to recover. And on top of COVID, there was the flu. And on top of the flu, there was what we called in our district, the dual pandemic with race problems and issues all across America with riots. And just all of everything was happening all at once. And it was just challenging.”
On her hopes for the advice column
“My hope is to say, ‘Hey, this is us. We have our own community.’ Like, we can actually help each other through what may be the toughest time in history.”
The original article was published in St. Louis Public Radio. Sylvester Brown of The St. Louis American contributed to this report.
