It’s mostly love

Today, feeling cranky and wrung-out, I said to a friend, “What other job would I be good at?”

As soon as the words left my mouth, I answered my own question: “It doesn’t matter. This is the job I want. This is the job I love.”

And in spite of everything, this continues to be true. My head and my heart have both been so full and heavy for the past two weeks, which is what happens at the end of the year -- every year. It’s easy to forget this. I’m not writing this to dismiss my concerns or my frustrations, because they are real, but somehow it helps to remember that education -- despite the fact that everything changes constantly, really all the time, and our heads are perpetually spinning -- is really the same everywhere, and what was true a decade or two ago is still true today. When I pick up my battered copy of Up the Down Staircase and flip through it, I’m always amazed at how this book, published in 1964, so accurately captures the essence of all the absurdities we face. Fortunately, it also captures the deep love teachers have for this job and these kids. That doesn’t change, either.

And so I was inspired to flip through one of my old journals, from 2003. I was a fairly new teacher then, and full of righteous indignation. And I had to laugh at myself (and sigh a bit) because the things I was ranting about are the exact same things I’m ranting about now, more or less. And it’s funny. When you stick with a school for thirteen years, you see a lot of changes. Schools are incredibly dynamic places; thousands of kids flow through our doors, and every four years they are completely new kids. Teachers come and go. Administrators come, stay a few years, and move on to other things. Every group has its issues and agendas. Some years are tough; I’d go so far as to say I’ve survived some years in which my school was truly in crisis. By contrast, last year was possibly the best of my entire career so far.

This year has been tough for lots of reasons, and I am tired. I seem to have lost my filter somewhere, and I yell some things in my classroom that undoubtedly make me seem completely unhinged. But then this happens: I act like a crazy person, and I believe with all my heart that I will go home and call my husband and inform him that I am very sorry but I will be quitting my job because it is terrible. And then one of my students hangs back after my last class of the day. It has been a shitty, shitty day with them and I have let them know it. He lingers near the door and I wonder why, because he doesn’t turn in work and he doesn’t stay after for help, and while he’s not generally a discipline issue, exactly, he’s also someone who acts up depending on who’s in the class with him. I snapped at him during class for being generally obnoxious, but that’s not unusual.

Anyway, he stays, shuffling his feet a bit. I look up and sigh. “What can I do for you, Sir?” I ask, trying not to sound irritated. He walks over to my desk and drops his head.

“Sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be disrespectful today.” And then he sticks out his hand to shake mine.

The thing is that I know he means it. The thing is that I know it has taken the better part of a year for him to approach me like this, with sincerity and -- dare I say it -- maturity. He is not going to pass my class this time, but I have this hope that he might pass it next year because today I saw three of last year’s sophomore boys (who did not pass my class) working on a project in the computer lab and they fell all over themselves yelling at me to come and see that they were working, and they were passing, and they read the book! Wasn’t I proud? And the thing is that I am. They might act like insufferable little asses as sophomores, but sometimes -- often, really -- they turn into pretty great people. I believe this even when I don’t see it, because faith is what keeps me going. And sometimes, I am lucky enough to see it.

“Look at you three,” I said to these three goofy goons, these boys I loved but who frustrated me so much last year. “Look at my babies, all grown up.”

“I was born grown,” scoffed one of them, but he didn’t try to hide his grin.

So anyway, I shook the hand of this sophomore boy. “I appreciate it,” I told him. “You’re a good man.”

I am not exaggerating when I say that the smile he gave me in that moment is the reason I keep doing this job. It’s not necessarily the students who write the best essays; those students will be fine no matter who their teachers are, no matter which school they go to, and they aren’t necessarily smarter, or kinder, or more creative, or more hilarious. This boy’s smile was full of heart, and I felt, for a moment, that we made a genuine human connection. Why do we read or write or spend our days in classrooms full of teenagers if not to connect with other people -- our messiest, most raw human selves?

And that’s why I love teenagers. As I drove home today I thought about how every single generation since the beginning of time has said, “Kids these days are nothing like when I was in school.” Kids these days are terrible, right? They are lazy and disrespectful and entitled. They are disruptive and apathetic. Did I hear those exact words spoken about my graduating class? Of course. I entered the classroom as a teacher in 2001 and I wondered what kind of nightmares I’d face, because I heard those exact words spoken about the kids that year, too. I’m pretty sure the adults telling me that my students were “the worst they’d seen” were also labeled terrible, lazy, entitled, disrespectful teenagers in the 60’s (hey, go read Up the Down Staircase if you don’t believe me). I mean, sometimes it’s true, I suppose; sometimes teenagers frustrate me to the seething end of my last frazzled nerve, for all those reasons. I yell at them to put down their damn phones and join the world. I yell at them for whining. I yell at them for expecting something for nothing.

None of these things are special afflictions of this particular generation. I’m sorry, they’re just not. You can’t blame the president for bratty teenagers; you can’t blame all the collective parents together (seriously, in the news alone this week I’ve read no end of “If today’s parents would only...” comments). I find myself wishing that people could see the things I love about the kids I teach -- their passion, their spirit, their righteous indignation. They are testing out who they want to be, and they often humble me with their kindness, their shyness, their vulnerability and raw need to just be loved.

I have loved this for thirteen years, and it has not a damned thing to do with the principal or the superintendent or what standards I’m supposed to teach, and I would also argue that a child’s experience in my classroom does not change based on any of those things. And I’m not unique here, which is another reason I can continue to go back and sign my contract at the end of a week in which I just hate everything; I know I work with people who get it. To be honest, if you feel the need to explain to little ol’ idealistic me what teenagers are like, or what teaching is like, and you are not in the trenches actually doing it, I must respectfully inform you that I stop listening to any sentence beginning with “Kids these days...” or “If I were a teacher...”

Sometimes I really have a love/hate relationship with this job. But it’s mostly love.

Someday I want to tell the boy who stayed after class to shake my hand that he changed my heart in that moment; he made it bigger. He has no idea that as soon as the door closed my eyes overflowed. He reminded me that no matter how angry or tired or frustrated I am, I continue to believe that these small moments matter, and that I am deeply blessed to live in them.

Yeah, I’m angry.

It happened again today: someone opened fire in a school, people were killed, someone was hurt, and it is not going to stop.

I wasn’t even surprised. This happens all the time here, now. And it is not going to stop.

Obama is right. Yes, he is, go ahead and unfollow me now, whatever, he is right: we’re the only developed country on earth that puts up with this bullshit. We have a completely fucked-up gun culture. It’s a culture. It’s not the laws; believe me, I am in all kinds of favor of stricter gun laws. (Okay, go ahead and unfollow me now, that’s fine; I’m a Montana girl who probably just handed in her Montana card, so I’ve been told.) But slapping on stricter laws isn’t going to do much when something at our core is this broken. I just do not. Do not. Understand this obsession with our “right” to carry guns all over the damn place.

Mass shootings are not even surprising anymore. They’re the norm. Any school shooting could happen at my school, a place I love. It could happen at my daughter’s school. It happened at a nice little Christian university in my city a few days ago. They don’t happen at a particular kind of school, they happen fucking everywhere.

My heart was shattered when twenty children exactly my daughter’s age were gunned down in their own classroom; I could not (and can still barely) handle reading a single word about it. My heart is battered now because it’s not going to stop. We know this. It’s not going to stop. And we’re not doing a goddamned thing about it.

Deep breathing

It’s June, and I am tired. Like most teachers, probably. It’s different this year, though; last year I was actually grateful for the credit retrieval class I agreed to teach because it allowed me to ease gently away from the school year. It was, in many ways, one of the best years of my career. This year I’m a flight risk. I want to slam the door and keep running, kind of like the time in first grade when I left class to go to the bathroom and just kept running out the door. That was in December, and I slipped on the ice on the way home. Split my chin wide open and bloodied my coat. I feel similarly battered right now.

And maybe that’s hyperbole, but just the same, I arrived home this afternoon and collapsed on the couch, telling my husband (who, thankfully, worked from home today -- I just need help existing this afternoon) that I needed a twenty-minute power nap before picking up Isaac and taking Suzannah to swimming lessons. I just finished Donald Hall’s Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry, in which he makes a pretty compelling argument in favor of twenty-minute naps. Maybe if I can figure out a way to incorporate more of those into my life, I will be slightly less mentally ill.

I’m done with all of my major grading for the year and I absolutely refuse to carry any more papers home with me. My sophomores are working on their finals next week, performing Act V of Othello. My lesson plan for the next few days is to bat them irritably away from my desk and say, “Go over there and work.” And then I write down all the ridiculous things I hear them say while they’re rehearsing.

Girl #1: Oh, my God. Can I please be in the slapping scene? I’m super good at fake slaps.
Boy: Well, except that happened in Act IV. Desdemona gets murdered in Act V.
Girl #2: But watch her.
(Girl #2 fake-slaps Girl #1, who is, indeed, quite good at fake slaps -- receiving them, anyway. I suspect they’ll find a way to work that in before Desdemona is murdered.)

And for some reason, all the boys want to be Desdemona.

Boy: I’ll wear a dress if you can find me one that will fit.
Girl: Oh, and I’ll do your hair!
Girl #2: And I’ll do your makeup.
Boy: I am not wearing makeup. You put makeup on me, Imma slap you.

But it’s not all silliness. Today I found myself ranting at a group of kids -- kids I adore, I might add -- who were making snarky comments about a different group of kids.

“You guys are just so mean to each other,” I muttered. “That’s maybe the hardest part about my job sometimes. Seriously. I hate it. I hate watching people I love treat each other so badly. Maybe I should be doing something different with my life.”

They gave me that Oookay, crazy lady look, but one boy said, chastened, “No, don’t stop teaching. Just...try to ignore me when I say mean things. I don’t really mean it.”

I took a deep breathe and reminded myself that it’s not really the kids who are making me feel so defeated this week. I mean, teaching at the end of the year is nothing like teaching in September; teaching in May and June is all whining and grade-grubbing and me freaking out because they’ve decimated my marker collection (what is so difficult about putting the caps back on!?) but I also understand that this is just part of the cycle. We’re all insufferable at the end of the year. It’s much easier for me to accept it from kids; it’s harder when adults behave badly.

So it has been kind of a dreadful week. But. But. It is June, and summer is so close I can taste it. We have a lovely backyard, with a relatively new patio and lots of space for patio furniture, a grill, and a sprinkler. We live near lots of parks (plus a great splash park). We have memberships at the zoo and the Pacific Science Center. Suzannah has started swimming lessons, and next month Isaac will follow after he finishes this session of gymnastics. Suzannah’s birthday party and final show for her gymnastics class both happen next Saturday, and for Father’s Day we plan to get up stupidly early, take Matt to brunch at Easy Street Records, and spend the day hiking. Today I began planning our summer road trip to Montana, dreaming of Glacier National Park, the drive across the Hi-Line and south through Great Falls before arriving in Bozeman -- all the landscapes of my heart. I’m finishing up a writing class I’ve loved (one I’m taking, not one I’m teaching), and I can’t wait to be back in the class in a few months.

The point is that I don’t have to look very far for perspective. The point is that my life is full of simple, beautiful things. The point is that I have more than I need and everything, really, that I want. What I want is the sunshine and the sprinklers, the grubby children in the bath at the end of the day, the books read on the patio while the kids paint or play or run around with the neighbor boys, the road trips with the camping and the hotels, the visits to Grandpa and Grandma.

And in the meantime, even in the midst of all the other crap, this week has blessed me with the reminder that I work with people I like, people I respect, people who are my friends. I teach some great kids. My work is never dull, never a drudge. The price is that I reach a point of burnout, even crisis (or so it feels sometimes), but I always manage to find my fumbling way back, and even now, tonight, on the edge of wanting to slam the door, I believe that will happen again.