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.