Looking closely at what makes the best teachers happiest, one big idea stands out: the greatest teachers love teaching in large part because they love learning.

 
They love the act of learning. They belong to that subset of people who look around at the world and say wow! a lot. More particularly, they have a passion for the subjects they teach, and their excitement about chemistry or poetry or history or photography lights up their students, and gives their classrooms genuine common purpose. And they not only love learning in general, and love learning about particular subjects, they love who they become when they teach and learn. Great teachers notice that different challenges bring out different sides of themselves, and they like the people they become when they teach. They say things like, “Teaching helps me be the version of myself that I really want to be.”

 
Consider this reflection by a Chicago English teacher:

I’ve done a lot of things in my life, and I’ve lived in a lot of places. I’ve earned my living with physical labor, working in offices wearing a tie, focusing on how much I can make in a day or a week of a month. And I know that with each outfit I put on, I was a little bit different. I was a different guy working on the phone selling financial services. I was a different guy delivering heavy boxes. And I know I’m a different guy working with 9th- and 10th-graders, helping them learn to write well, to read carefully and to think in a straight line. I’m a better listener. I’m a better father. I’m a better man. I like who I am better. I’m prouder. And that all boils down to being a happier guy, even though the work is pretty hard a lot of days.

 

Different Angles on Teaching Math in Japan

A set of videos of teachers teaching math in Japan in the 1990s have become kind of famous among American teacher-trainers. I had the chance not only to see them a couple of times with a few years in between each viewing, but also to view and discuss them with a group of other teachers I respect a great deal.

 
The first time I saw these Japanese math videos, I was struck that the class work was so collaborative. After years of hearing education reformers and politicians talking about how much more serious and successful Japanese math instruction was compared to American instruction, I was expecting a lot more drill-and-kill style rote learning. But in the videos, I saw much more teamwork, much more flexibility in how the teachers encouraged the students to think about a range of different ways to solve problems. There was a creativity, a skill in listening to their students and thinking through unexpected ideas that these math teachers brought to their classrooms that I loved. That was my big takeaway from my first viewing of the videos: these Japanese teachers are warm, creative, good-at-listening teachers, almost the opposite of what I had expected because of the narrow, outcomes-focused arguments of their American champions. Boy are these back-to-basics education reformers misinformed, I thought at the time – they think that math instruction in Japan is similar to old-fashioned rote learning, American style, circa 1920. But math students in Japan seem to be performing better than American students not because they’re sweating over their times tables more, but because their teachers are more creative and collaborative. That was a big revelation.

 
And then time passed. Years, actually. The debates on education ebbed and flowed, issues came and went. Japan’s economy crashed; Japanese businessmen stopped buying prestige office towers and golf courses in major American cities; New York City’s Rockefeller Center reverted to American ownership. Our national feelings of envy and vulnerability toward Japan faded. And then, recently, I saw the Japanese math videos again. And this time they looked very different. The cohort of Japanese middle-school math teachers were still more creative and flexible than our stereotype of a Japanese style of learning would suggest. But something more leapt out this time around: they were in love with math.

 

These teachers were skillful and engaged as classroom leaders, but they were equally engaged as students of mathematics themselves. And indeed there was a connection between these two traits: the fact that these teachers were so engaged in the interesting aspects of math that emerged in their lessons – when an unexpected answer popped up, they were not only receptive to the unthought-of approach because it’s good teaching to be that open, but they were also receptive because the new approach revealed more about alternative mathematical approaches to solving a problem. The genuine excitement in the room was not only about students being heard, but also about mathematical problems being illuminated by the noble (even if deeply imperfect) attempts of the students to comprehend and to solve them.