I Don’t Want to Be Teacher of the Year

Some of the best teachers I know will never fit in or win awards—and that’s not an accident

Somewhere along the way, I got it into my head that winning Teacher of the Year was something I wanted. I can remember the moment, actually. I bought a book—Ask a Science Teacher by Larry Scheckel. Good book. On the back, his bio mentioned he’d been named Teacher of the Year.

That stuck with me. I remember thinking: That seems like a good place to start.

In my district, it basically runs as a staff vote—nominations, testimonials, and by December, a name gets called. I got nominated six times.

Lost all six.

For a while, my email signature actually read: “Six-Time Teacher of the Year Loser.” It got laughs. It felt self-aware, like I was in on the joke.

But every December there’d be another announcement, another name, another round of applause echoing down the hallway—and if I’m being honest, it started to sting more than I wanted it to. I took the line off my email signature. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realize that what I really wanted wasn’t the title.

It was the validation.

What Was I Chasing, Really?

Teaching has a way of leaving questions open. You can have a great day and still walk out wondering if it actually landed. You can care deeply about what you’re building and still feel like you’re guessing more than you’d like. I can strut out of my building on a “teacher’s high,” second-guess myself all the way home, and spend the evening on the couch, convinced I’m probably doing more harm than good.

So when something shows up that looks like an answer—something that says, yes, this counts, this matters—it’s hard not to reach for it.

I don’t think I’m alone in that.

That’s the quiet question that follows you around in this job: Am I any good at this? And it doesn’t always get answered in a way that sticks. For a while, I thought Teacher of the Year might be that answer. A kind of finish line—a flag in the sand.

It turns out it’s more like a mirror. It doesn’t just tell you how you’re doing—it shows you what you’ve been measuring yourself against.

Unpacking Teacher of the Year

Once I started really looking at it, the whole thing shifted. Because if you strip the romance off it, Teacher of the Year isn’t some careful, long-term evaluation of impact. It’s a vote. It’s a set of stories people tell about a teacher that others recognize quickly enough to agree with.

Which means, at its core, it’s a kind of consensus.

And consensus has a bias. It doesn’t necessarily pick the best—it picks what’s easiest to understand, what fits a story people already believe about what a “great teacher” looks like.

So the award ends up doing something subtle but important. It doesn’t just recognize a teacher—it points to a version of teaching and says, “This right here, this is what we value.”

And there’s another layer to that we don’t always say out loud, but we all know. We tend to reward the teachers who give everything. The ones who stay late, take on more, carry more than they probably should—the ones who let the job expand until it fills whatever space is available in their lives.

I was going to say I have a begrudging admiration for teachers like that—but mid-sentence, I caught myself. Delete.

I don’t. I don’t have respect or admiration for teachers who kill themselves for this job. I have worry. I have pity. Like the ghost of Christmas Present, I can see the future: “I see a vacant seat in the poor chimney corner…”

My friend, Sarah Jaffe, has written many books, and the one that applies here is Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. It applies. You should read it.

Because somewhere along the way, we started to confuse exhaustion with excellence. Self-sacrifice instead of self-preservation.

But to be honest, I’ve felt that pull too—the idea that doing it “right” means giving more, staying longer, saying yes more often. As I’ve gotten older in the job and seen more and more friends burn out, I don’t think that’s the way to be good at this. I’m not even sure it’s sustainable.

So the question changed.

Not why didn’t I win?

But do I actually want to be the kind of teacher this system can easily recognize?

The Platform (And Its Cost)

To be fair, there is an argument for it.

Teacher of the Year comes with a platform. It gives you a little more reach, a chance to say something that carries beyond your classroom. I’ve seen people use that well, and I respect it. But I’ve also seen what tends to happen to that platform over time. It gets polished. A little more careful. Shaped, sometimes subtly, into something that fits the room it’s being presented in.

Not because people are being fake, but because there’s an expectation about how you’re supposed to sound once you’re representing something larger than yourself.

And that’s where I started to hesitate.

A platform only matters if you can stand on it without sanding down what you believe. I’m not sure I’d be very good at that version of it—or maybe more honestly, I’m not sure I’d want to become good at it. And if I ever got to that platform, they might tell me I can’t curse.

Oh, hell no.

The Validation Trap

As I mentioned earlier, at some point, I had to be honest with myself, and (together with my therapist) we got to the root of the issue: I wanted validation. I came to teaching as a second-and-a-half career, and some days, even sixteen years in, I still can feel like an imposter.

And what I didn’t see at first was how easy it is to start taking your cues from wherever that validation comes. You notice what gets recognized, what gets praised, what gets lifted up, and without ever making a big decision about it, you start drifting in that direction.

Not because you’re trying to sell out. Just because you’re human.

But over time, that drift adds up. You adjust a little here, a little there, and one day you realize you’ve been shaping yourself to fit something you never actually chose.

And then it turns: if you let the system tell you you’re good, you eventually have to let it tell you who you are and who to be. I could feel that happening, just enough to make me stop and pay attention.

The Mold and My Classroom

Around the same time, I started noticing something else: there’s a mold.

No one hands it to you, but you can see it in who gets highlighted and how they’re described. There’s a certain kind of classroom that translates easily—clean, polished, easy to walk into and understand in a few minutes.

And then there’s my room on a random Tuesday. Plants are growing in simulated Martian soil in the back. Stacks of Explainers I’m getting to. Books everywhere—textbooks, sci-fi, graphic novels, The Science of Rick and Morty tucked in there because of course it is (I wrote it). An inflatable Mjolnir for…let’s just say, “motivation.” Something hanging from the ceiling that will eventually be part of a high-altitude balloon launch. A bag of trilobite fossils. Models of spaceships. Action figures. Captain America’s shield. Physics equipment that’s exactly where it needs to be, even if it doesn’t look like it. An orphaned, but well-used Periodic Table on a desk.

It’s not clean, but it’s not a mess either.

It’s in motion.

Things are being built, tested, argued over, and figured out in real time. It doesn’t always resolve neatly by the end of the period, and it probably doesn’t photograph especially well.

But there’s thinking happening. Real thinking. On my part and the kids. We’re all trying to get better at what we’re doing.

And if you walked in and tried to take it all in at once, I don’t know that it would read as “Teacher of the Year.”

That used to bother me.

It doesn’t anymore.

Map Followers vs. Map Makers

The more I’ve sat with it, the more I think this comes down to something pretty simple.

Systems are built to reward consistency. That makes sense—consistency is easier to evaluate, easier to defend, easier to scale. But consistency tends to favor people who follow the map.

Some of the best teaching I’ve ever seen doesn’t come from the map. It comes from the detour, the adjustment you make in the middle of a lesson when something isn’t landing, the risk you take when you try something new and aren’t entirely sure how it’s going to go. That lesson you deliver, and halfway through, you find yourself thinking, “Huh…they’re really getting this. I wonder if they realize I thought it up in my car on the way to work?”

That kind of teaching is harder to standardize, harder to measure, and a lot harder to package into something everyone immediately agrees on. Do this job long enough, and you start to trust those snap decisions. You just know. Can’t fully explain it, but you know.

The system doesn’t need more people who can follow the map.

It needs more people willing to draw one.

It’s counterintuitive to the extreme, but systems like education don’t tend to reward mapmakers. They reward map followers.

You Know What? I Don’t Want It.

At some point, this stopped being about whether I could get it and became about what getting it would actually mean. And once I followed that all the way through, the answer was a lot clearer than I expected.

I don’t want to be Teacher of the Year.

Not if it means becoming the kind of teacher that wins it. Not if it means sanding down the parts of my classroom that don’t translate cleanly from the outside or trading real, in-progress thinking for something that just looks better. Not if it means coloring inside the lines.

This isn’t about anyone else. Some great teachers have been recognized that way.

It’s about me finally being honest about what I value—and what I’m not willing to trade to get a title. Because somewhere in all of this, something flipped.

I didn’t lose Teacher of the Year.

I think I kept something.

And once I saw it that way, it stopped feeling like a loss and started feeling like a choice. I’m not an “award-winning” teacher. I’m too unpolished for that.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not a good teacher.

I’m a fucking amazing teacher.

And I’m also frustrated—constantly—that I’m not as good as I want to be. SO the work continues.

If It Happens Anyway…

I do have this feeling, though, that writing this guarantees I’ll win it someday. The universe has a sense of humor like that. And if that happens—if they call my name, hand me the plaque, take the picture—I’ll take it for what it is.

But it won’t mean what it used to mean to me. It won’t mean I finally figured out how to fit.

If anything, it’ll mean the opposite. That I stayed the teacher I am—messy, a little off-script, building things in real time—and somehow that counted anyway.

If I ever do become Teacher of the Year, it won’t be because I fit the mold. It’ll be because, for a moment, the mold cracked.

A friend once told me, “Look, if you ever win Teacher of the Year, that means something has gone terribly, terribly wrong with the system.”

It’s taken a while, but I finally understand what she meant.

She could see me clearly before I could see myself.

You Have My Permission, For What It’s Worth

So if you’ve been chasing it—quietly or not—I get it.

You don’t have to chase every title your system or other groups offer you. If you’ve got a goal in mind, and reaching that goal needs all the awards you can pile up, cool. You go and do you.

But hear me out: you don’t have to become more acceptable to be more effective, or smooth out the parts of your teaching that are still alive just so they make sense to someone passing through for a few minutes, or can be written up in less than 300 words on a Google form ballot.

The work that matters most in this job often doesn’t translate cleanly. It doesn’t always show up well in a vote or a write-up.

That doesn’t make it less.

Some of the best teachers I know will never be Teacher of the Year—not because they couldn’t be, but because they built something that doesn’t fit neatly into what gets recognized.

And the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that’s not a flaw, it’s the point.

So if your classroom doesn’t always look the way it’s “supposed” to, if your best work doesn’t always read well from the outside, if you’ve felt that gap between what you value and what gets rewarded, if you bristle from time to time at how things run, you’re not behind.

You might be exactly where the work actually is—doing what matters for the people who need it most.

Go out and kick ass, non-award-winning teacher.