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Education, and especially the life of a teacher, is constantly evolving. Teachers' roles and responsibilities have become more complicated and multifaceted over time. Therefore, they have to invest a great deal of time, energy, and effort to navigate the demands and complexities of their role. In the last 20 years, education has changed in response to increased workload, the rise of high-stakes testing and accountability, social-emotional and behavioral challenges among students, school safety concerns, equity concerns, and now the coronavirus pandemic. These factors have been linked to high stress and teacher burnout, which leads to more teachers leaving their jobs (Arvidsson et al., 2019). Nonetheless, those who endure the flames of burnout do so because they are resilient in the face of adversity and persistent in their commitment to the call of teaching and learning. This chapter examines the effects of stress and burnout among three alternatively certified teachers and the behaviors and strategies these educational first responders employ to build resilience and persistence in their service to the students who shape our future.

This chapter uses narrative inquiry to tell the stories of two female neophyte educators experiencing the oppositional misalignment between their idealized perception of female teachers in American society and their personal realities by providing alternate images of women in education. American teachers, especially women, are perceived as a homogeneous group that lives to serve the children of others and inhabit a monochrome, two-dimensional, existence inside the educational landscape of schools (Clandinin & Connelly, 1996). However, the prevailing notions and outdated imagery of teachers is flawed in its lack of acknowledgment of the richly diverse and textured lived experiences of women both inside and outside of the educational field. Furthermore, female teachers face tremendous pressure to imitate these unrealistic ideals and expectations at the expense of the authentic self, which can lead to a myriad of internal dissonances, such as burnout, serving as an umbrella over PTSD, anxiety, compassion fatigue, decreased confidence, and lower job satisfaction. The researchers in this chapter come from nontraditional backgrounds to capture the negative effects of subtle, persistent, and unrealistic expectations of females that contribute to feelings of burnout at the onset of our teaching careers.