All we can do

I wish I would have written more in October -- well, written anything here. Lately, I've come to appreciate all the other October journals I've uncovered from all of my years of teaching. When my colleague asked me, "Is it always this terrible?" I went hunting. She and I have worked together for our entire adult lives, more or less. Could we be so lacking in perspective? Surely, we've had worse.

And we have, I guess, objectively speaking. We've both weathered tougher classes, survived tougher moments.

October is a rough month. During my first year of teaching, on the Friday before Halloween, I fumbled my way through my last class of the day in a dank, moldy room I shared with another teacher. I taught forty-two students that period - more than I've ever had in a class since then - and one of those students was a tightly-wound boy holding the weight of what I now recognize as many ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences). He had anger issues, among other things, and when I learned about the way his father had thrown him against a wall and broken his arm when he was in the sixth grade, I understood a little better. And he was actually quite respectful to me, although easily frustrated when he didn't understand something immediately. But that afternoon, I guess you could say he lost his patience with kids in the class who had learned how to press his buttons just enough.

They weren't a bad group. I actually really liked that class, as much as a first year teacher can like a giant group of sophomores when she has very little idea of what in the hell to do with them for eighty minutes every day. But they were teenagers, and this boy was an easy target. And he snapped. He stood up and screamed at the top of his lungs:

"SHUT! The FUCK! UP!"

He lifted his backpack from the floor and hurled it at the brick wall, next to the window. It wasn't zipped, and his stuff went flying. He threw his CD player next. It broke against the brick.

I can still see him in that moment. The way the veins in his neck stood out. Maybe one of the other kids snickered nervously, but what I remember is the silence that followed. And now, all these years later, I remember shaking on my drive home, watching ads for Bartending Academy on the little 13-inch TV in the living room of my one-bedroom apartment that night, and asking Matt - who had just moved from Minnesota a couple of weeks earlier - why in the hell I hadn't done something else with my life. He took me out for Happy Hour at a fancy nearby bar and I sipped a fancy cocktail, a splurge for someone who had only earned one paycheck in her new job and someone who hadn't yet found a job in his new home state. The next day we found a new coffee house - we tried to spend our Saturdays exploring - and I sipped a latte and wrote furiously in my journal. I'll always be glad I wrote it all down.

(I could write so much here, too, about how sometimes I hardly recognize the teacher I was at 22, about how I can hardly believe anyone hired that child dressed up in teacher clothes, about how opinionated and self-righteous and indignant people in their twenties can be, and about how I don't for one moment wish myself back to those days.)

That was a hard moment in my first year. What I've learned is that hard moments don't discriminate; they can happen in year one or five or fifteen. I'm not convinced they get worse, and I have absolutely no patience for the "kids these days" bullshit fed to us by adults who don't actually work with or love teenagers, or who have forgotten that adults have always had the exact same narrative about "kids these days." Kids are kids and they always have been. Other things change, and other things can make all the difference to a teacher who feels all the way to her core that she is where she belongs, but is unsure of whether she has what it takes to stay there. Or whether she has the support.

For example: I hit very low points in October of 2011, 2014, and 2016 - moments when I truly wondered if I had what it takes to keep doing this. It was more than just a bad day. I don't really want to rehash those moments, but it does help, somewhat, to remember that this time of year can be brutal, that bad times happen, and that it is possible to fall back in love with the work. So far, I have. Every time.

The class I taught during the 2011-2012 school year nearly broke me; support from the right people saved me. And even though that class was particularly horrific, I met some of my favorite humans there, too, and I'll never forget weeping my way through the worst department meeting I've ever endured (another story for another time, perhaps) and saying, "I love those kids, and I would do it again." The fall of 2014 nearly broke me for different reasons. I filed a claim that made me feel angry and vulnerable, and I paid very close attention to the people who had my back and who didn't. I taught a really, really tough class and found myself loving a really, really tough kid, one who hated me at first sight and who kept me up at night for months worrying, up to and beyond the day she dropped out of school. Something about her caught like a fish hook in my heart. On the last day I saw her, she sneaked into my room for one last hug before running out, before a police officer intercepted her on campus. I was never, ever going to get her to pass English class, but I thought, at the very least, maybe she would remember that someone loved her. Talk about ACEs: She had more than enough for a lifetime before she reached the age of sixteen. Teaching was so much easier when she wasn't in my room, but she tore a piece of my heart when she left. A couple of years ago I taught a group of freshmen who exhausted me every day with their attitude and lack of impulse control, and while most of them have turned into pretty okay humans, I still remember the day one of my colleagues ran into my room and said, "I've been reading about lead poisoning on the internet, and I actually think that's the problem with ________." We laughed, because sometimes what else is there to do? And I said, "I just can't call her mother one more time. That woman works hard all day. She can't come home to another call about her kid being a shithead. She knows."

I've survived so many moments that felt unsurvivable, and the important thing to note here is that I survived because of my village. This is simply not a job we can do in isolation. I hate those inspirational teacher movies that showcase that one badass teacher who thrives and connects with her students (by the way, do any of y'all count the number of students in those fake movie classes? It's always, like, twelve) despite the fact that she's surrounded by bitter, apathetic colleagues. That's a load of bullshit. I survive because of my colleagues. We love these kids together. We cannot do this work alone. I love sharing stories of my students, and it's possible I do this more than most teachers because writing about my life is the way I move through the world, it's how I process, it's how I stay even a little sane, but also, it makes me nervous, because when well-meaning friends comment that they "wish there were more teachers like [me]" I really need them to understand that I am not a Hollywood teacher. I am simply one of many in the trenches, only I'm one who happens to have this irritating need to write about it all the goddamn time.

The truth is that teaching can be incredibly toxic. Teachers are expected to take the very abuse we train our children to fight, to reject. We're "coached" by "instructional leaders" who have far less teaching experience and far less student contact than we do. Those folks have their own pressures, to be sure, but it certainly doesn't translate to support of teachers or support of kids; often I think it comes down to marketing and optics instead of what actually serves our students and supports those of us who spend our lives - literally, our lives - with them.

I'm grateful for my old journals, because they give me perspective. Teaching has never been easy. I've been struggling this year, perhaps more than I expected. I'm teaching classes I usually love. I'm excited about developing curriculum and implementing new learning. Having the freedom to design a course, to teach the very things that set my soul on fire is truly an unspeakable privilege. I know better than to take for granted the fact that I'm trusted with this, and more or less left alone to do it. At the same time, there are trends in education, in administration, that truly frighten me. There's no other career I've ever wanted, ever, but I also can't say that I see myself retiring from this one. There have been very few times over the last two decades when I've been willing to say that aloud to another human being, and let me tell you right now, I can't even think those words without swallowing around tears. But there it is.

All I can do is take it as it comes, I suppose. All I can do is advocate, beg, tell the truth, cry into the night, pray, and show up for as long as I can. All I can do is write about it.