The Thick-Skinned Teacher: Stoicism in the Classroom

I recently attended a professional development workshop for high school teachers, and we were asked to share ideas about the characteristics of a great teacher. People offered a range of responses: great teachers are experts in the subject they teach, are passionate about their subject, create strong classroom structure, and articulate clear expectations. They are caring, encouraging, engaging, enthusiastic, fair, and firm. When I was asked, I thought only of what seemed to me to be the quality proving useful in some of my more challenging encounters with teenagers: a thick skin. I am in the midst of the reverse of Trent’s professional journey. He taught in high schools and then later anchored his scholarly interests “in how people learn to understand and cope with life’s more trying realities.” I taught and wrote about philosophy and education in universities, but now teach full time in a high school. I brought my scholarly interests to bear in helping me cope with one of life’s more trying realities: the high school classroom. Like Trent, I have been thinking about stoicism often lately, and I was thinking about it during that professional development session. Trent mentions early in this paper that he helps his students “get to grips with what it would look like to be the sort of teacher who shows up facing the ‘difficult’ aspects of teaching without being ‘discouraged’ by them.” He goes on to discuss how we would all benefit from a new orientation nowadays, “finding the strength to try to make things better for our fellow travelers.” Philosophers of education, he argues, should develop the themes of acknowledgement and affinity, helping people develop these stoic principles. Trent shows that those themes prove foundational for our ability to encounter and engage others. Trent suggests that affinity and acknowledgement are educational ideals – ideals far more meaningful than those we are told to reach through pedagogical alignment or other educational buzzwords. In many ways, I’m an ideal respondent to Trent’s paper. Like Trent, I have found the modern stoics like Donald Robertson (2019) and William Irvine (2008) to be compelling guides to living well. But those sympathies place me too close to Trent’s side. In this response, therefore, I focus on the subject he mentions briefly before turning to broad stoic themes in philosophy of education: what value is stoicism for teachers? It is no secret that teachers face trying circumstances. Beyond the unfortunately common physical assaults they endure, students ignore, insult, mock, and undermine their teachers. And that is just to mention some of the challenges they encounter with students. Teachers are also subject to harsh treatment at the hands of parents, administrators, and school boards. Someone listening to teachers describing their experiences might conclude that the most remarkable of their abilities is perseverance in the face of what would cause outrage in other workplaces; many strong teachers have developed a thick skin. They focus on the things they can control when working with humans whose prefrontal cortex is still in the process of development, who are hormone-fueled, and who are bent on liberating themselves from the tyranny of school authority figures. Indeed, teachers’ thick skin is not only valuable for themselves, but also for their students. The ability to maintain one’s equanimity in face of challenging circumstances helps create classroom environments more conducive to learning; there is one less unpredictable variable at play when a teacher manages to stay above the fray, focused on the task of helping form human beings. That is a brief and general case for stoicism’s value in the classroom today. But the Stoics …