The Cry of the Teacher’s Soul. Laurie R. Matthias

Teaching is hard. External pressures are steadily increasing, leading to high rates of attrition and burnout. Unlike other resources that attempt to address those external factors, The Cry of the Teacher's Soul offers hope by focusing on the key factor of good education: the teacher. It does so by examining the teacher's inner life–mental, emotional, and spiritual. For the Christian teacher, paradoxes in teaching such as idealism/reality and performance/authenticity often parallel similar paradoxes in the Christian faith. By embracing these paradoxes that probe the depths of issues around identity and purpose, the teacher can sustain the difficult vocation of teaching, even thriving instead of just surviving. Each chapter focuses on a cry of the teacher's soul, features a teacher's story that illustrates that cry, and then explores the paradoxes embedded in teaching and in Christianity.