What I Hate About My Middle Schoolers

When they told me that I would have to teach middle school, I thought

Oh, no. Oh, God, please, no. Not them. Not those kids, those big ones I see in the hallways. They’re bigger than I am. They don’t listen. They won’t like me. Please, please, no. Anything but middle school.

But I had no choice. They needed an English teacher. And I needed a job.

And so we were brought to one another, you all and me. 
I had already you were going to hate me. 
You had already decided you hated English class.

So, what was there left to do?
What could we do, if we were both unhappy from the beginning?

We spent several grueling months, me fighting you to listen in class, and to do your grammar homework, and to turn in your writing assignments.

And finally, after nearly a quarter of the year had gone by and we all hated every minute of it, I realized what I needed to do. And I felt so stupid for not realizing it sooner, because as soon as I did it, everything that had gone so horribly wrong turned right.

I decided that I was going to love you. So I did.

I love you to pieces, even when you’re gossiping instead of listening to me.
I love you to pieces, even when you don’t turn in your homework.
I love you to pieces, even when you’re driving me absolutely crazy.

I made the best decision of my life so far when I decided to love you –

And people may tell me that you can’t “decide” to love someone, you just do –

But I’m telling you now, that I did decide. I could have hated that year.
But instead, I loved you.

Now, don’t get me wrong: there are still A LOT of things I hate about you.

I hate that you have to go to school for 8 hours every day and then go home and do 4 hours of homework just to keep up.

(If you’ll recall, I started giving you time in class to do all of your English homework, and I made time for us to study for tests together, and we would read out loud in class so you could all meet your AR goals – and this would be why.)

I hate that you have to grow up in a world with such a focus on being tall, and skinny, and beautiful – whatever that even means – but at the same time, there is a kind of snobby condescension used on people who are these things: they’re “trying too hard,” they’re “getting by on their looks,” they’re “too pretty to be smart”. So those people who are tall, and skinny, and beautiful are also taught to put themselves down: don’t accept the compliments, defer the attention onto something that you don’t like about yourself instead. And in that, there is no winning. Everyone, without even meaning to, is either taught how to hate everyone else, or they are taught how to hate themselves, and this is something that we all have to fight, together.

(If you’ll recall, I didn’t tolerate anybody putting themselves down in my classroom, even if you said you were joking, even if it was about something minor, even if you were complimenting me in the process – and this would be why.)

I hate that you have to grow up learning to sit down, be quiet, not voice your unpopular opinions, not say what’s on your mind, not “talk back” to adults, even when they are wrong, wrong, SO INCREDIBLY wrong.

(If you’ll recall, when you told me you hated my class, hated the book we were reading, hated the teacher down the hall, hated school, hated your parents, hated me…I always asked you why, and I let you explain, and I gave you advice, and I didn’t just tell you to “be nice.” Because sometimes things aren’t nice, and people aren’t nice, and those in charge of us are wrong about things, and we need to know how to deal with this and talk about it and make sense of it – and this would be why.)

So you see, there are a lot of things I hate about you.

I hate that you have to grow up in a world where you will constantly be having to defend yourselves from attacks on your religion, your culture, your looks, and your lifestyle.

I hate that you are so young and already seeing things I've never had to see, not once, in my life that is twice as long as yours.

I hate that you have to be prepared, always, to fight back against oppression, and hatred, and things you don’t deserve because you are only children.

I hate that I forget how young you really are, because of the things you say, and the things you know about, and the things you have to understand much earlier than people in the past did when they were your age.

I hate that you have to be so strong, all the time. But I love that you are.

I love that you are strong-willed, and impassioned, and willing to fight for what you believe in.

(If you’ll recall, I let you argue with me – a lot – and I didn’t shut you down with “because I said so”; we fought tooth and nail about a lot of things, and I let you justify yourselves, and sometimes I wondered if I was letting you take advantage of me because I didn’t just “put my foot down”…but now I’m so glad that I didn’t – and this would be why.)

I love that you support one another, and despite your quibbles and quarrels and general ridiculousness sometimes, you stand strong. In your life, you will be facing a world that does not understand you, full of people who will not be willing to try, and you will have to stand together so you do not fall apart. Do not break yourselves apart from within. Even though you may not realize it now, you are a powerful force, so powerful that sometimes you blew me away with it.

(If you’ll recall, I’ve written this all for you – and to me, words are the most powerful of things. You’ve given me these words because of everything that you do and everything that you are. You are so powerful – and this would be why.)

I love that you are proud of who you are. And I’ve got nothing to add to that, except that I’m just really, honestly proud of who you are too.

I love you. I love all of you, every single one. And when I leave this school, and you continue to learn and grow and be stronger than you ever thought you could, and you forget me (as you will, and that is okay), please know that I will still be thinking about you, and missing you, and loving the hell out of you.

Because, in the end, I may hate a lot of things about you – things that you can’t control, things that happen to you and things that I can’t stand to watch or even think about sometimes, but that you have to live through, every single day.

I hate these things, and I imagine that I will always hate these things.

But no matter what I hate about you, I will always love you.
And more than anything else, no matter what happens to you,
I will always love the fact that you all happened to me.

Dear Teachers: Please Hold On

I am halfway done with my first year of teaching. It has been incredibly unlike what I expected. Hired as a Pre-K 3 teacher (that’s three-year-olds), moved to 4th and 6th grade just one week later, the same week that I began to commute 3 times a week for graduate school – something that sounded perfectly doable when I taught little ones in a half day program that I was prepared for (mentally and resource-wise), but turned into something much more trying when it became teaching two unfamiliar grades for eight hours each day. It is something that I was not sure about, and it terrified me, and at times I will admit that I found myself hating it. But it has been such a blessing, and even though I am still in the midst of it, I am already able to look back on it with some clarity and appreciation for how far I have come over the last five months. 

I hear so many first-year teachers complaining (and I’m no exception) about how hard it is. And it is HARD. It is exhausting to go into this with nothing, and have to create everything from scratch – physical materials and lesson plans, yes, but also mental paradigms about what it means to be a teacher and how to be a teacher. You will never hear me say that teaching is easy, and it especially is not easy when it’s new. As with most things, it’s impossible to truly understand teaching until you’ve been thrown into the midst of it, with no babysitter to guide you along. My classroom is mine, and I am wholly in charge of everything that happens within it, and that is honest-to-God terrifying. I am being trusted with the education of over 40 children, and it is being assumed that I have any idea what I am doing.

Luckily, I have an idea what I am doing. I feel good about myself and my classroom and the way I teach. But I think that there are some teachers who do not feel this confidence. And maybe my confidence is misplaced, but I think that even misplaced confidence is better than none at all. As far as I’m concerned, maybe I’m not doing everything right…but I sure am doing it with enthusiasm.

That being so, there certainly are still times that I am exhausted. There are instances when I am annoyed. There are days when I am genuinely concerned that if a child were to ask me just ONE MORE question that I have already answered five times in the last hour I would just have to lie down on the floor until they all leave. Sometimes I need to just sit silently in my car and stare at the road as I drive home because I literally cannot take any more noise. But those moments are few and far between, and most importantly, they are forgettable.

I have heard that in childbirth, women are in so much pain that a hormone is released to literally make them forget how terrible baby-birthing is so that they won’t be too physically and emotionally traumatized to have another baby. While this is terrifying in its own right (One day my body is going to trick me into thinking I didn’t just almost die of pain not but five seconds ago? Great.), it is also how I feel about teaching sometimes. I have those class periods where I just want to kick all of the children out of my room and hide in the dark so they’ll stop asking me if they HAVE TO write down the science notes on the board (“Well, I definitely didn’t just write out the definition of ‘low-pressure area’ because I can’t get enough of meteorology.”) even though we JUST WROTE SO MUCH in math (“Wait, what? We only wrote short strings of numbers.”) and they are TOO HUNGRY to focus right now (“Are you serious? It’s 8:35. You just had breakfast.”). But give me a few minutes to hide in the teacher’s bathroom during a passing period and stare crazy-eyed at myself in the mirror, and I’ll forget how annoyed I was.

This resilience is important for teachers. If you are a person who cannot bounce back, or easily lets things pile up and weigh you down, maybe you just aren’t cut out for teaching. Students don’t always listen. Administrators aren’t always helpful. Parents aren’t always available (or maybe they’re a little too involved). But these things pale in comparison – or they should, at least – to how important the job of a teacher is. I feel proud of myself when a kid who has been struggling in math finally understands how to do long division. I want to jump up and down (full disclosure: I have, many times) when we can diagram a sentence with 100% accuracy on the first try. I do little ‘happy dances’ (until I am commanded to stop by several 4th grade boys who think I’m maybe the un-coolest person to ever exist) when the kids make connections on their own that I thought I’d have to draw out with a million questions. It all makes up for those moments when I have to remind myself that banging one’s head against the wall is not an appropriate coping mechanism for a 22-year-old.

For all of these reasons and more, it breaks my heart to read the stories of other teachers, so burned out and frazzled that even getting up in the morning is a chore. I see other blog posts and opinion pieces, ranging from naïve first-year teachers in over their heads to seasoned veterans with years of pent-up criticism and hostility, writing pages and pages about how they have lost their will to teach, how standards and tests and lack of funding have stripped this profession of what little joy it had left. I see videos of speeches given by passionate educators vehemently ripping apart the American educational system, pointing to other industrialized countries who are, by some standards, doing “better” than we are. I hear complaints about low pay, limited resources, unimaginative and unmotivated students, unaccommodating administrations, and overly-pressuring teacher evaluation systems. With a heavy heart, I wade through seas of grievances daily, whether they are coming from those I work with or faceless screen names of educators who used to find so much happiness in what they do but have since lost their inspiration. 

And I pray that this will not become me. I fear that I truly am a naïve first-year teacher with delusions of grandeur spending hours at my school every evening and every Saturday just trying to keep up. Maybe I am seeing these so-called “bitter” veterans and saying “That will never be me!”...but what if it will be? What if we all start this way and slowly lose our fight over time? Maybe one can only take so many years of students who don’t listen and tests that don’t help and lawmakers that don’t understand before it’s all just too much. 

But I can hope. I can hope that I will have enough foresight to see this animosity and resentment coming to avoid it. I can hope that I will always be able to see the silver lining in the ever-present storm clouds hanging over my head. I can hope that years down the road I will still be able to remember just how much I love this, and just how important it is – not just to me, but to my students and their families and the community that I serve. I can hope that other teachers who think they are too far gone to love this profession again can find their way back. I can hope that despite the controversies over best practices and the level of importance assigned to standardized testing and the degree to which teachers should (can?) be held accountable for their students’ outcomes...we do not lose sight of the bigger picture.

In my opinion, the “bigger picture” is really the smaller picture. I can get so lost in the anger and antipathy that characterizes many teachers today. I can find myself nodding my head while reading about the injustices that teachers face when they have to “take the blame” for things beyond their control. I can feel the desire to march to the door of the Department of Education and demand the necessary changes while simultaneously threatening to chain myself to the front gates if I do not get my way. But for me, I feel that the biggest difference I can make is to stay out of the impassioned insistence that everything to do with education is terrible today. If I let myself get lost in the world of frustration and hatred regarding things that are, for the moment, out of my control, I will never be able to happily teach in my classroom again. Perhaps there is a middle ground, where a teacher can lovingly and effectively teach a class full of students while spending her free time marching on Washington demanding change. But I am not that teacher. I am just a girl who loves her students and loves her job and is afraid that losing sight of a believable short-term goal (teaching my kids to the best of my ability) in favor of a seemingly-impossible long-term one is the best way to burn out forever.

To all of those teachers who’ve spent so many years feeling helpless: I feel you. I don’t truly understand, and maybe (hopefully?) I never will, but I recognize your struggle and I am not just adopting a “better her than me” standpoint on the matter. I wish that we could all love going to work and not worry about whether or not our students’ test scores are going to determine our salaries. I want all children to be passionate about learning, all districts to have the funding they need, and all policymakers to truly understand what it means to be a teacher. I wish, I hope, I want.

What I don’t want, however, is to lose my fire. I desperately want to keep loving what I’m doing. I complain to my co-teachers in the break room. I vent to my husband constantly. I have lengthy conversations with imaginary adversaries in my car about whether or not what I am doing is right (they always lose, because I am a passionate debater). But despite this, I do love it. I do.

And to every teacher out there who thinks that this year is “the last year I can handle this”…please do not give up. You are not alone in your frustration. You are part of an enormous group of people who feel these same anxieties and have seen their most valiant efforts thwarted by lackluster students and unfair policies. And you are an important part of this group. You matter, in the short run and in the long run, in the little picture and in the big picture. Don’t lose sight of why you started all of this in the first place. Remember what it was like to be a bright-eyed, first-year teacher with a head full of impossible ideas and a heart full of passion and a belief that being a teacher is important, and meaningful, and what you want to do forever.

Remember, and don’t forget this time. For the sake of all of the newcomers who are so hopeful and impressionable. For the sake of the students who, despite being your 20-somethingth class, still see you as the single most important part of their classroom this year. For the sake of those on-the-fence teachers who want to believe that it will get better, but need help to get through the right-now-worst-of-it. And if you have only just begun and think you can't handle it any more, please try to remember as well. I am right there with you, and we can't give up on this.

I know I might be just some young, first-year airhead who has deluded herself into thinking something so resoundingly permanent as the "broken" American educational system can be changed – or at least coped with in good spirits.

But if you are on the verge of giving up completely, and it takes every ounce of your will not to storm out of the classroom tomorrow and never look back, maybe you can still hold on a little longer…if for nothing more than me and my wonderful delusions.