Teaching Heightens the Risk for Autoimmunity

Those of us with high-stress jobs have a greater risk of developing autoimmunity.  A 2001 mortality study investigated whether an association exists between teaching and death caused by autoimmune diseases.

Excess autoimmune disease mortality among school teachers

The study concluded that evidence had been found of "excess mortality from autoimmune diseases among teachers" and that "teachers experience an occupational exposure that increases risk of autoimmune diseases."

I first began noticing what I now realize were autoimmune symptoms in the first few years that I taught.  The job immediately began wearing me down.  In some ways, it has gotten easier.  Once I quit looking like I was in my 20s, which unfortunately didn't happen until I was around 38, students began respecting me at a much higher level.  It's crazy how much more respect students have when their teachers look more like their parents.

In other ways, teaching has become infinitely harder.  If I still had the lack of respect that I once did and had to deal with the additional modern demands of the job, I wouldn't be able to do it at all.  As it is, I'm finding it terribly difficult to keep going.

I teach at the high school level, and my job has become so all-consuming that I don't have much left for anything else.  I have managed to continue selling books on eBay and Etsy, but I haven't been able to do anything else in addition to that.  I am not reading and am not keeping up with most other things.

I can't get into the specifics of my situation, but I can tell you about the overarching problems.

Young people have an extremely short attention span.  That is, we all have a shorter attention span than we once did, due to social media and smart phones.  Teenagers know no other world.  All of my students were born after the first iPhone was released.

Students have changed profoundly since the pandemic.  We are still trying to claw our way out of that.

Students are blatantly cheating on everything with AI.  We can't prevent it.  When I confront a student who clearly cheated on a test by using AI, they tell me that the work is how their tutor showed them.  They don't understand how obvious it is that the work is AI and that no tutor would ever work a math problem the way that AI does.  The students would be better off admitting it, but no, they think they can deceive me.  What they get is a teacher who makes sure they are never able to use AI on a test again.  

Test days used to be great days when I could get a lot of grading done.  Test days are now extremely stressful, and I get nothing done.  Anyone who has managed to use AI on a past test is watched carefully, and I must be constantly vigilant to make sure students don't trick me.  For instance, a student might write problems down on a slip of paper, sneak it into their pocket, and then ask to go to the restroom.  If I don't ask for their phone, then the student might access AI with their phone while in the restroom and then write down all the correct answers for the test.

We are supposed to do everything on Chromebooks, but students don't learn well without paper and pencil.  Besides that, they cheat with AI on all digital work.

I have continued to use paper and pencil all along, despite the intense pressure to quit consuming paper.  It appears that people are finally realizing that doing everything on a screen has set us back greatly.  Technology is great, but it should be supplementary to learning that is done primarily with paper and pencil.

Most young people now have poor reading comprehension.  Even many young people who love to read have poor reading comprehension.  I have seen it firsthand in online discussion groups where youth can only read books at a surface level.  They have no idea of any nuance that is obvious to those of us who learned how to read long before social media existed.

We have a very severe teacher shortage in Oklahoma that is continuing to worsen.  This has been caused by all of the above plus the way we are treated by Oklahoma politicians.  You'd have to live here to understand how bad it truly is.  

Our Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Education from early 2023 to late 2025 treated teachers as if they were political activists whose sole purpose was indoctrinating children.  He called teachers unions "terrorist organizations."  He suspended teaching certificates of teachers who made statements on their social media that he didn't like.  He tried to take away the accreditation of school districts if he didn't like something they were doing.  If he were still the superintendent, I would not have included this paragraph as it would have been too dangerous.

Our state legislature continues to push out laws that make it worse.  One of their recent ideas was to use $25 million from the Oklahoma public teachers' retirement account to fund tax credits for private schools.  It probably sounds like I'm making this up.  

And there's a bunch of other stuff that they've done or attempted to do.  We feel like we are constantly under attack.

The severe Oklahoma teacher shortage has caused people to be hired to teach subjects for which they aren't certified.  For instance, a social studies teacher would be hired to teach math.  Yes, I'm serious.

When students have a teacher who isn't qualified, then they might not learn as well.  When the students go to the next course, the next teacher must teach them everything they didn't learn the year before plus all the new content.  That's a tall order.  

We keep being told to change what we're doing to some other method.  We get yanked one way, and then we're yanked back the other way.

Back about 15 years ago, a veteran teacher remarked that she had noticed that education goes in a circle.  She said that we continue to try new things and end up right back where we started, doing the same things over and over again.  I didn't have quite enough experience at that time to see it, but now I do.  Educators are constantly being forced to change to some great new idea, which is just a rehashing of some previous great new idea that didn't work any better than anything else ever has.  After a cycle of around 15 to 20 years, we end up right back where we started.  And the cycle continues.

The 2024-2025 school year broke me.  I would have retired in May 2025 if I had qualified.  This year is the very first year that I do qualify to take early retirement with reduced benefits.  It does please me to know that my retirement window has now opened.  I will have to work for three more years to qualify for full retirement benefits.  I am counting down by months and weeks.  Currently, I am at three years and one month.  Soon, I will be able to say "fewer than three years."