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.
