Teaching Your Heart Out: Emotional Labor and the Need for Systemic Change

All this time later, years after leaving the teaching profession, the memory of that day still gnaws at me. Had I set students up for emotions they weren’t prepared for? What messages had my words—and my actions and reactions—communicated? What should I have done differently? I remember little about my academic instruction that year—the subtraction lessons, the spelling tests—but the memories of that day and so many other deeply emotional experiences that year have lingered.
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