It’s an awful feeling to sit in your own classroom and contemplate quitting a couple weeks from the end of the semester. You look at the tapestry you purchased to remind you of the Sandia mountains back home, the college fair posters the ninth graders have been working diligently on, the cards and gifts students have offered on other days, the beautiful posters the kids made a couple months back about values like “Life always gives you second chances; it’s called tomorrow” or “When it rains, look for rainbows. When it’s dark, look for stars.”
And grimly you laugh and know that deep down you would never say certain things to your kids, to any kid, but you wonder who you could ask, who you should ask, “How can I look for stars when the darkness I’m slipping into is that of being underwater?” Obviously this line of thinking has been a red flag for depression, and I’ve done my very best to handle it — drinking water, going on walks, talking to people, regular sleep, etc. So it sucks when you still show up the next door at work, anxious and exhausted and moody as hell. And then you feel the same way the next day and the next day until two months have passed and you oscillate between considering a complete career change and just not existing at all.
Teaching in the US public education system, sometimes, is like being in an abusive relationship. I would know because I’ve been in some of those before. I’ve been here already, trying harder and harder every day to fit my codependent role as provider, a finite resource I’m trying to make endless. I’ve been here before, smiling and quietly deflecting other people’s concern and making excuses for other people. I’ve been here before, trying to convince myself that the harm being done to me is something I can handle, maybe something I signed up for.
And as I write this, I’m crying already because I know that rush is overwhelming me, that feeling of God-fucking-dammit, here we go again. Then the shame and anger and disappointment floods, like a torrent, like a typhoon, because I fucking made a promise to myself that I’d never be in this place again and yet.
And yet.
Here I am.
Again.
There is absolutely nothing I cherish more than an opportunity to see a young person learn. Anyone who knows me knows I light up the instant I see an infant or young child, because to me they are just joy and perception and learning. Everything they do and learn is new to them, and goddamn is it amazing to watch them gently learn to lift their heads on their own, blink their eyes, speak their first words or their first sentence, or ask their first question. Watching a teenager advocate for themselves, to defend someone else with thoughtful evidence and clear reasoning, to watch them imagine a future for themselves they had never thought possible…how could you not feel deeply connected to these young people as their eyes light up, marveling at the miracle that is life?
But lately, in my worst moments, I told someone I feel like I’m lying when I tell kids I care about their learning, like I can’t say that I care and be a teacher at the same time. Because sometimes I feel like everyone is judging me on how good of a teacher I am based on whether or not I can keep children in one classroom sitting in one place for seventy-five minutes. On how many assignments or worksheets they can finish in a week. On how “productive” they are in my classroom. I feel like I’m letting them down when I don’t say anything again, about their phone use, their half-assed assignments, about their horrific apathy towards the world. I feel like I’m letting them down when I fail them, or that I’m letting them down when I don’t.
I know a lot of it is because of two things: I’m horrifically good at measuring myself by impossible standards, and the truth is that genuine learning is not something easily measured. It’s something I just kind of intuit, day by day. If a student who has been on her phone the past month puts it down because the Drunk History clip about Harriet Tubman and Her Army of Bad Bitches made her laugh and pause, I think that’s a start. A month later, she’s quietly always taking notes and following along, asking key questions and contributing critical reflections about how gender impacted the experience of slavery for Black women versus Black men. Then there’s that really lucky day, when you check in with a senior who took classes with you last year, and she says she’s getting A’s on her essays for her community college class. There’s a sense of relief that maybe it’ll pay off, and you hope that that’s a sign of your own teaching and the work you put in, but honestly, it’s hard to tell. Most likely, you just happened to be the right class at the right time in her life, and you should be grateful for that. That needs to be enough.
But I’m really tired of being a queer woman of color in education. It’s this bizarre trap where the whole world can tell you it’s not your job to educate the privileged and yet it’s also literally your job to educate children. And how any child needs to learn varies by day and child, so sometimes it looks like literally putting your body between two young men fighting because no one else is around. It is the deep breath you take when they call someone a bitch, and that lack of breath when they call you a bitch. It’s the tentative head tilt as you try to figure out how to tell a ninth grader he can’t just loudly make comments about his teacher’s body, even if they are objectively true (my calves are indeed large). It is not knowing how to react when you overhear boys comment about you and your body in the hallways. It is holding the stories of sexual assault that students casually share with you after school, or walking with a student through her mediation with three young men who were exposed sexualizing her body and the bodies of other young women of color in horrific ways in a group chat. It is jokingly reminding them that maybe one day I’ll have a wife or a husband or maybe just a nice outdoor cat with a cauldron of witch’s brew. It is pulling yourself out of the dissociative void when you hear them shout rape jokes, because you are the adult in the room and the other survivors in the room need to see you be the first one to shut that shit down.
And sometimes educating the children means also educating the men around you, the White people, the straight folks, the older folks who keep demeaning you in ageist ways. It’s amazing, how a comment that initially seems to just be about my age — “I didn’t realize you were a teacher!” or “I love how much energy you have, but you’ll understand someday why it can’t go that way” — ends up surfacing all my anxieties about race and gender at the same time. It’s amazing how often, when I have told people I don’t want to be in such a toxic environment, that there is some reminder to me that other schools are worse. This is a soft school, people tell me. We don’t have hard kids like other places. As if any child is ever really hard. As if that was at all the issue. As if our kids actually know how to be soft, or that they have permission to be soft. Live soft.
As James Baldwin writes, “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” And sometimes I think the most important thing they learn that day, I hope, the one thing I hope they go on to imitate me as some kind of elder in their lives, is that they find softer ways of being, being able to live in our little truths just as much as we are fighting for the greater Truth.
“I really want to quit teaching”. That’s how I’ve felt so many times this semester, far more than I did at all my first year of doing the work. But when I think about it, when I have time to breathe, then maybe it’s this:
I really want to quit a world that enables toxic masculinity and insidious racism. I want to quit White silence, the poisonous nature of White optimism, glassy-eyed and venomous. I want to quit holding myself up to impossible standards. I want to quit the myth that teachers are saviors or martyrs, and not professionals who want stability, fair wages, career development, and the possibility of life outside our work like everyone else. I want to quit working in a culture that equates more time with more productivity. I want to quit feeling like the only way to protect children and their learning is to sacrifice my own body and mental health. I want to quit trying to cope with lack of accountability through reminding myself that patience is a virture.
So maybe I don’t want to quit teaching, like I’ve thought so many times this semester. It’s winter break now, and I’m going to rest. I’m going to sleep and breathe and eat well and go on walks and be with people who love me. I’m not going to quit my job. Not yet.
But let 2019 be the year I continue to live these questions, however painful they may be to live. Let it be a year where I quit everything that asks me to compromise my softness and my truths.
