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Hey, New Teacher, Don't Quit. It Will Get Better

Starting a new job is always tough — no matter the profession. But the first year for a new teacher can be brutal.

Research shows that roughly one teacher in 10 will quit by the end of that first year, and the toughest time — for many — is right now. In fact, this season is so famously hard on teachers that it even has a name ...

Here's a recent excerpt from the blog Love, Teach:

"Hello. Sorry it's been so long. I seem to have fallen into DEVOLSON ... an acronym I invented that stands for the Dark, Evil Vortex of Late September, October, and November. It's kind of a homophone for "devil's son," which is intentional. I discovered that it's the time of the school year where teachers are the busiest, craziest, and, usually the saddest."

We first mentioned DEVOLSON a few weeks ago, when our colleague, Meg Anderson, wrote the post below and struck a chord with lots of teachers — and not just newbies. The response was so great that we decided to make a little DEVOLSON radio. Just click on the little triangle up there and let the fun begin.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Cory Turner reports and edits for the NPR Ed team. He's helped lead several of the team's signature reporting projects, including "The Truth About America's Graduation Rate" (2015), the groundbreaking "School Money" series (2016), "Raising Kings: A Year Of Love And Struggle At Ron Brown College Prep" (2017), and the NPR Life Kit parenting podcast with Sesame Workshop (2019). His year-long investigation with NPR's Chris Arnold, "The Trouble With TEACH Grants" (2018), led the U.S. Department of Education to change the rules of a troubled federal grant program that had unfairly hurt thousands of teachers.

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