Education

Thanks, But No Thanks

By Anthony Rebora — July 07, 2008 1 min read
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The news that Carleen Gulstad, Minnesota’s 2008 Teacher of the Year, has relinguished the title for personal reasons has caused a minor uproar in the state and fueled some useless/idiotic speculation. But as a former state teacher of the year in Michigan, Nancy Flanagan has sympathy for Gulstad and guesses that her reasons for begging out might have something to do with curious nature of the TOY institution:

It’s totally not my business, either—but I’m guessing she took a hard look at the schedule set for her to meet the demands of her “honor,” then very gently and politely said no thanks. And that is certainly her right—and may turn out to be a good decision for her. ... It is generally a wonderful, enlightening experience, but it is often exhausting. Being a Teacher of the Year also involves a different skill set than being an excellent classroom practitioner, and represents the involuntary assumption of a new job for a year—a job for which you have no preparation.

Incidentally, Gulstad’s counterpart in North Carolina, Cindi Rigsbee, recently wrote an article for Teacher about some of the qualms she felt about taking on her TOY position.

It does seem a little ironic that states officially recognize the extraordinary dedication and talent of these educators and then voluntarily remove them from the classroom for a year.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Blogboard blog.