They say comparison is the thief of joy — it’s a thing I’m working on in therapy this year. My therapist very helpfully has pointed out that I have a tendency to immediately compare my experiences to those of other people’s, to try and give a ‘measured’ reaction to whatever I am experiencing, out of a fear that I am having an ‘overblown’ response when ‘others have it so much harder.’
My therapist has this magical power of giving me these resonant affirmations once per session, that often linger with me for the rest of the week. This time, she said,
“What if it’s as simple as: it just doesn’t feel right.”
So I’ve been thinking a lot about what has felt right in my body and my life.
It took a lot of energy and care to convince people around me sophomore year of college at Stanford that being a teacher was what I really wanted to do after I graduated. I was so energized by the picture of education put forward in classes like Introduction to Teaching and Learning with Jennifer Wolf, or Hip Hop Pedagogy and Education, as curated by Jeff Chang and H. Samy Alim. I loved the coursework in both classes and I realized that not only did I love children and justice, I actually also loved curriculum development and the research behind learning and growth.
Even though my mom expressed skepticism, even though others worried I was squandering my ‘elite’ Stanford degree, even though classmates in my English major classes would smile stiffly and say “that’s…great!” (or “that’s cute!” if they truly had the gall), it felt right. Double-majoring in Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity and English, to me, felt like the right kind of coursework to be rigorous in whatever I offered to my future students. I had a deep sense of purpose in college when it came to my coursework, and I thrived in my learning.
I moved past the easy suggestions to “just do Teach for America” and insisted that I wanted to pursue a Master’s degree in Education through the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP). Because I felt like again, that’s what I would need to do right by my future students. I was willing to take on the loans, apply my junior year, and prepare for an intense master’s program just one week after I graduated from an already grueling undergraduate experience.
STEP ended up being nothing like what I thought it’d be — in fact, I was miserable. For the first time in my life, I was a truly horrible, contrarian student. I had assignment anxiety and my poor supervisor had to hound me over her break to get me to turn in what were straightforward assignments. I caused trouble in classes that I thought were pointless. I hated the tedium, the toxic positivity, the lack of critical consciousness and the overwhelming white gaze of the teacher education program. Aside from my supervisor and a couple instructors who sustained me through the program, I felt direly unseen and unwell in the program.
But I persisted, because becoming a teacher and going through all of this felt right.
The last five years, from the day I started student teaching to now, have not been easy. The Pulse shooting in Orlando happened just a few weeks into our summer student teaching. Donald Trump was elected president in my first semester of student teaching, and my entire teaching career has been shaped by his policies, by those of Betsy DeVos, by the local negligence of district and city leadership in San Francisco.
I have worked in a windowless classroom for years with terrible HVAC system that we can’t even control onsite. I have been hazed by traumatized students who were afraid I’d leave them like all the others. I’ve stepped in to interrupt physical fights, been the first person a student contacted about racism or sexual violence or abuse or suicidality. I’ve had so many conversations with young people about class content, but also heartbreak and boundary setting, substance use, disordered eating, and violence. Every year I have taught, I have also lost a student, or former student, or a colleague, or watched my co-workers hear about losing yet another community member.
I’ve taught night school and summer school, coached volleyball, written recommendation letters at the last minute, tutored students during lunch or after school, coordinated and chaperoned field trips, attended IEP meetings, filled out IEP forms, apologized constantly to students for my many mishaps and mistakes, planned curriculum for six different classes (LGBTQ Studies, American Literature, US History, College & Career, Health, and English Language Development), planned and facilitated professional development on Instructional Lead Team, led grade-level and department meetings, advocated for equity in Culture & Climate Team, demanded better conditions for all workers as Union Building Representative, attended professional development, read educational theory and other books to deepen my practice, attended Back to School Night, attended School Site Council meetings, listened in on Board of Education meetings, brought in guest speakers for advisory —
And so on and so on and so on.
I’ve done these things because they felt like the right thing to do or the right place to be at the time; I can’t look back at anything I’ve done and say I regretted it. I am so grateful for all the things I’ve learned in five years of working and teaching at my wacky school site full of immense chaos and immense joy.
And this was all before the pandemic. I was fortunate to find that the transition to distance learning in terms of curriculum hasn’t been the worst thing in the world; I had years of slides set up already, for the chronically absent students, like the cancer survivors who were often sick or the students who were suspended or the students who just needed freedom more than they needed good attendance. I had already designed my curriculum with them in mind, prepared for the students who took my class asynchronously.
Pandemic teaching has been a mixed bag but in many ways it hasn’t been too different from the reality of teaching at my school site before. Some things are better, like the later start time for students and the flexibility for young people to determine what a learning environment looks and sounds like for them. For me it’s been nice to be able to look out a window while I’m teaching. For some students they’re sleeping more and not waking up at 5am to make their commute, whether it’s to go from BART to a series of Muni buses, or just hope that they won’t be skipped over at their stop by overcrowded buses, or they’re lucky they no longer have to worry about being jumped in their neighborhood during peak traffic hours. Students say they’re not as distracted by petty hallway drama and teachers aren’t all in their personal space.
It’s at this point that I hear this conflicting chorus in my head:
“Why did you do all those things that weren’t your job?” and
“Why are you making such a big deal out of all those things? It’s just part of the work.”
Teachers really can run the whole gamut of toxic behaviors, myself included, because we’re all trying to cope with exploitative conditions the best way we can but it’s hard to not eventually let the effects overflow into some part of our relationships somewhere.
I think some teachers just shut off because it’s too much to bear, and they have numbed themselves to certain relationships to survive. They speak to me with the hardened nature of combat veterans, their eyes focused on the mission ahead.
While I admire these teachers, I have to admit I feel soft and at times weak around them. I can’t emulate their calm or their ability to shut things out. They tell me “you just have to ‘close the door,’ figuratively speaking and don’t let any of the noise impact the important part: the kids.” And I feel a little crazy because I don’t know exactly how to close the door when it feels like the forces that be tear down my door every day and flood it with new inane policies, paperwork, or petty bullshit.
Other teachers have martyr complexes, hoping that if they just pour themselves into the work and sacrifice themselves to the exploitation, this will all amount to something. Maybe if we do our job right, cross every t and dot every i, then our students will be less harmed and we’ll find a way out of it. This also meant that when I said my workplace felt abusive, however, older teachers have tried to counsel me with well-meaning but ultimately toxic positivity. They also make me feel weak and inadequate in the work, like I’m just not putting enough of a positive spin on things or “giving it my all,” as if any form of labor under capitalism is truly worth all of my being.
“We are not human doings, after all,” a teacher of mine named Dr. Gruber once told me. “We are human beings.”
So in the midst of all this, I guess I am trying to be, and I am trying really hard to be honest with myself.
Maybe it’s teaching at my school site. Maybe it’s teaching in San Francisco Unified. Maybe it’s teaching in the Bay Area. Maybe it’s just teaching in this era. Maybe it’s me.
But doing this work makes me very unwell,
and I don’t know if it feels right anymore.
