Is Teaching a Bullshit Job?
Of course not. But in three significant ways, yes.
Several years ago, David Graeber wrote a viral essay in which he argued that millions of people spend their days working jobs which they themselves consider to be meaningless. He called these “bullshit jobs.”
In a subsequent book, Graeber defined “bullshit work” as
“a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” (emphasis added)
This is, importantly, a subjective definition. I can’t tell you that your job is bullshit, nor can you tell me that mine is. Each employee must decide for themself whether their work is, in fact, pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious.
When I first read this essay, I was a high-school math teacher. And it made me wonder:
Is teaching a bullshit job?
The simple answer to this question is, obviously, no. Helping young people grow is probably the most valuable work there is. Teachers take our most valuable resource — our young people’s potential — and shape it towards a brighter future and a better world, for all of us. Being a teacher is the definition of essential, meaningful work. I say this as a student, an educator, and a parent.1
Yet as a teacher myself, I often looked at what I actually did every day — teach lessons on precalculus — and wondered if those lessons had any real value. And when I considered my students and what they really needed, I realized that there were three ways in which my hard work did feel pointless, unnecessary, and even pernicious.
In other words, there were three ways in which teaching actually did feel like a bullshit job.
To explain the three ways in which teaching is a bullshit job, I want to tell you about:
Three students, and
One math problem.
The students were all in a precalculus course I taught at Eastern Senior High School in Washington, DC. Here’s the math problem:
Whether you remember how to solve this problem or not2, it’s a great problem for a precalculus course. It involves functions, which are a core topic of high-school math, and the idea of combining multiple functions into one underlies most of what we do on computers all day.
So, it not a bullshit problem to teach.3 In fact, I loved teaching this topic.
But my three students experienced this problem in very different ways.
Student #1: David
David was an excellent math student. He had always been at the top of his class and wanted to become an engineer. He solved this math problem almost immediately, and I knew he understood the concept. He was ready for a new challenge.
Of course, I still had a 45-minute lesson to deliver to his classmates, who didn’t yet understand. That was okay, of course — the point of my lesson was to teach them! But the rest of my lesson, on a topic David already understood, held little value for him.
I saw his attention drift, and if I’m honest, I didn’t know whether it was worth the effort for me to capture it again.
Teaching feels like bullshit when some students already understand.
If students like David already know everything you’re showing them, there’s really no point in making them learn it again. It wastes precious time they could be spending learning new things, and creates a management challenge for their teachers.
It is, to quote David Graeber, “pointless, unnecessary, and pernicious.” In other words, bullshit.
Student #2: Anna
Like David, Anna was also 17 years old. Unlike David, her math skills were very weak: she tested at a fourth-grade level. As a result, she hated math.
Can you blame her? She had never scored proficient on an end-of-year math test, but she had been passed along anyways. Now she was in precalculus with me. She needed this credit to graduate. All she wanted was to make it through the year.
To Anna, my problem on composite functions may as well have been written in Greek. She had seen problems with functions before — and with support and guidance from patient teachers, she had even been able to solve them. But Anna didn’t actually know what f(x) or 3x or even just x in an equation means. (If you haven’t been a math teacher, this is way more common than you would think.)
Anna had no idea what to do. She put her head down her desk and waited for me to rescue her. In the process, she continued to lose confidence in her own intelligence and ability.
Teaching feels like bullshit when some students are not yet prepared to understand.
We know this is the case: in 2022, only 33% of American fourth graders were considered proficient in reading, and 36% were proficient in math. Yet we pass them along to more advanced content regardless, and proficiency rates continue to drop as they age.4
When we do this, we pretty much guarantee that students like Anna feel inadequate. We don’t actually end up teaching them much either. We just drag them along until they drop out or graduate.
Giving Anna problems she isn’t ready to understand is another “pointless, unnecessary, pernicious” use of time. It’s bullshit too.
Student #3: Troy
Troy wasn’t actually in class to see my lesson on composite functions. He had issues at home, so he was often absent. When he did arrive, he was usually late or distracted.
There wasn’t much I could do about that. But I had to teach a new lesson every day. So whenever Troy showed up to class, he would start with whatever lesson I happened to be teaching that day — even if he had missed the previous one(s). That made it really difficult for Troy to catch up.
And this happened to Troy all the time! He would miss the start of a new topic, then show up midway through the unit. In any subject, it’s hard to start on Lesson 3 if you’ve missed Lessons 1 and 2.5 So whenever Troy came to class, he struggled.
I printed make-up work packets and gave Troy notes from lessons he had missed, but this was rarely sufficient to catch him up. (The whole point of going to school is that students can’t learn from make-up work packets and copied notes alone.) And I didn’t have the time to repeat lessons I had already covered.
Teaching feels like bullshit when some students aren’t in class at all.
Chronic absenteeism is a huge and growing problem: in 2023, 26% of students were absent for at least 10% of the school year.6 Yet these students, despite missing significant amounts of class, are still expected to learn the same content as their present peers.
It’s a waste of Troy’s time to try and learn things when he’s obviously missing the building blocks he needs, and a waste of my time to try and teach those things. It’s the definition of “pointless, unnecessary, and pernicious!” Teaching Troy new lessons before he has the chance to catch up on old ones is bullshit.
So there I was, trying to deliver a lesson that:
David already understood.
Anna couldn’t understand.
Troy wouldn’t see at all.
I knew my job was worthwhile. I formed relationships with the young people I served, and did my best to inspire them. But a lot of time, what I was actually doing was teaching lessons that failed to meet any of my learner’s actual needs.
And as I stood there, trying to teach a lesson on composite functions to a room full of students who didn’t need or weren’t ready to learn it, I couldn’t help but wonder:
Why am I doing this?
It felt like bullshit to me. I imagine it felt like bullshit to my students, too.
Is it any wonder that so many students hate school and so many teachers want to quit?
How we got here
David Graeber doesn’t blame anyone for the existence of bullshit jobs. He doesn’t blame the people who work in jobs they consider meaningless, and he doesn’t blame the companies that employ these people. Everyone is doing the best they can! Our system of employment has simply evolved in a dysfunctional way. He concludes:
Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3–4 hour days.
We just all happen to be stuck in a world where a significant proportion of the working population feels their jobs are useless.7
I think the same thing is basically true for our school system as well. Every individual in the system wants young people to learn, and works hard to achieve that. Yet the system we have somehow ensures that few students actually do.
So far as I understand it, that system works something like this:
Policymakers — politicians, school boards, funders, etc. — set standards for what they want students to learn. (For instance, the Common Core.) Standards are good!
School and/or district administrators divide those standards into yearlong courses, designed to be taken by students of a particular age. (For instance, all 17-year-olds in DC Public Schools take a course called “Precalculus.”) Well-planned courses are good!
Teachers come to school every day and deliver lessons designed to cover particular standards. (For instance, a lesson on composite functions.) Lessons with clear objectives are good!
Students come to school most days — less often for students like Troy — and work hard to complete the lessons provided to them. Working hard is good!
Everyone here is doing the best they can, but students still aren’t learning.
The challenge here isn’t with any individual policymaker, administrator, teacher, or student. The problem is what I call the fundamental challenge of teaching: every learner has different needs.
Unfortunately, however, our current instructional system — which advances students based on their age rather than their understanding — treats most same-aged students as if they were exactly the same.
So when we put learners as diverse as David, Anna, and Troy in the same classes and expect them to understand the same lessons at the same pace every day, we set all of these brilliant young people up to fail. We set their teachers up to fail, too.
We need a system of instruction that meets every learner’s needs.
Fortunately, this already exists.
A Bullshit-Free Approach to Teaching
This post/rant is already long, and it would take many more posts like it to explain the details of an instructional approach that meets every learner’s needs. (Shameless plug: I wrote a book about it!) But I want to share the basics of that approach, with a promise to explain more details in this space soon.
A lesson that meets every learner’s needs has three essential elements:
Digital direct instruction. If a teacher explains new content live, it’s inevitable that advanced students like David will be bored, below-grade-level students like Anna will be lost, and chronically absent students like Troy will miss out altogether. If, however, the teacher delivers new content through short, focused instructional videos, students can learn anytime, anywhere — and teachers can spend time in class working closely with individual students.
Self-paced learning. Different students need different amounts of time to learn new content. So every student should have the time they need! This prevents students like David from feeling held back, and students like Anna and Troy from feeling rushed. Teachers can and should impose reasonable constraints on self-pacing, but in general, students should have the time they need to learn.
The requirement of mastery. It’s counterproductive to push students through content they can’t yet understand: not only does it create learning gaps, but it sends students the message that they aren’t capable of real understanding. Before any student advances from Lesson 1 to Lesson 2, therefore, their teacher should ensure that they truly understand Lesson 1. This builds the learner’s confidence and sets the learner up for future success.
This video from the Modern Classrooms Project summarizes this approach nicely:
Thousands of teachers around the world deliver instruction like this every day, in every content area and grade level you can imagine. You (or your teacher) can, too.
And as for me? I co-founded the Modern Classrooms Project, and in future posts here, I’ll explain exactly how you can run a classroom like the one above - and how you can help students as diverse as David, Anna, and Troy succeed.
No BS!
Thanks for reading - and I hope you’ll subscribe for even more updates soon.
David Graeber agrees! He writes:
An objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble…
Plenty of high-school math in the United States is completely irrelevant to most students’ lives, but that’s not the critique I am making here. And I tend to think that solving any problem, even if irrelevant, helps students build valuable problem-solving skills. What I want to argue here is that even teaching obviously relevant content often feels like bullshit.
Data for this is at The Nation’s Report Card. It’s not pretty.
It should be hard to start a unit midway through! If it isn’t hard to start on Lesson 3, it suggests that Lessons 1 and 2 didn’t really matter in the first place.
Rates of chronic absenteeism almost doubled in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. More on chronic absenteeism at the Return 2 Learn Tracker.
There has been plenty of debate about the percentage of workers who actually feel their jobs are meaningless. Here’s a nice analysis.