On Teaching

My first year of teaching I got strep throat four times in six months and had to have my tonsils out over Christmas break. I was 24 and anxious about having surgery for the first time, so I cried when I told my principal. She looked up from her paperwork, stared directly into my watery eyes, and said, “I just can’t have you missing that last day before break. It’s really important for the kids to have you there.” I wiped away the tears and nodded, explaining that I had already considered that and scheduled the surgery for the first day of vacation for that very reason. I started vacation having my throat torn to pieces and spent the next 10 days eating applesauce and ice cream. I returned to work 10 pounds lighter and only a day after eating regular meals again.

I started therapy that year because of the Sunday anxieties. As each weekend would slowly start to fade away, my body would bristle with the anxiety of the work week ahead. I was anxious that I would oversleep, anxious that I wouldn’t be prepared enough, anxious for unpredictable classroom behaviors, and anxious that my Spanish wasn’t good enough. I was anxious that the reading fluency scores weren’t moving up as fast as I needed them to, and I was anxious that the pile of papers to grade never seemed to get down to zero.

I spent three years working for that first principal, and I am not afraid to say that she was a tyrant. Each year, she would target a teacher to fire just before they got tenure, both to exert her own authority and also to bring in her own new people. We would always see it coming, when a colleague came to us in tears after a negative evaluation. “What can I do to improve?” they would always say. We would be supportive, but we always knew that no amount of effort would change the principal’s mind. One year it was a teacher that had been outspoken of her union support. Another year it was a teacher that was sitting at her desk too often instead of moving around the room. 

That principal was also never willing to admit when she made a mistake. Once she accidentally transferred a student into my bilingual second grade classroom who had no previous bilingual education experience. She refused to admit fault, and told me that the assistant superintendent himself had suggested that I just give her some extra support on the side to make up for her inability to understand our content lessons taught entirely in a language she had never interacted with before. Had I approached the superintendent, I’m sure I would have discovered that this conversation with the principal never happened, but I also would have been fired.

To say that teaching is a demanding profession doesn’t begin to express what goes into each day on the job. Teachers start the school year spending hundreds of dollars of their own money and hours of unpaid time in their classrooms curating the perfect educational environment for their incoming learners. Their instruction is a collision of state and local standards, district curriculum, creative planning, and the personal touch that brings it all together. Every moment of every day they navigate 25-30 (or more) individual human learning and safety needs while simultaneously presenting ways to interact with engaging content that will move each of them forward in their own academic lane. And that’s just the part when they’re on stage in front of students. Evenings are spent grading papers, planning lessons, gathering materials, and sometimes heading to the Dollar Tree for the loose end that will tie the lesson together. I can’t speak for all teachers, but I know that for me, in the midst of this balancing act, there was always the constant nagging feeling that I wasn’t good enough, that I could have been doing more, and that I was letting down my students. The papers weren’t graded fast enough. The student outburst that derailed the lesson could have been handled differently. The lesson could have been more student centered. It never took long for the weekly anxieties to meet the should haves and could haves.

I remember once when my therapist asked me to imagine the stacks of papers that I had waiting to be graded. By then I was three years into teaching and she said, “What is the worst thing that could happen if you just recycled those papers? What if you didn’t grade them at all?”

I paused and thought about it for a minute. “Getting fired.” I said. Not only was that my answer, but I truly believed it to be possible. My anxiety had disillusioned me into thinking that my job was everything, my worth was tied up into how perfect I was at it, and that at all times I was a breath away from having it all taken away because I was such (in my mind) a terrible teacher.

I worked tirelessly to please my principal, to please the parents, to please the administrators, to please the community, and to shine for the students. I timed my water drinking with my ability to take bathroom breaks, and learned how to eat lunch in 10 minutes so I could also prepare for the second half of the day. When I was 8 months pregnant, I asked a staff member if she could watch my class for a moment while I used the bathroom and she was extremely offended that I would consider her position so low as to have time to monitor students for a moment while I peed. After my first child was born, I pumped milk in staff bathrooms or storage rooms and ate my hard boiled egg and hummus with carrots over the rhythm and hum of the breast pump. My daughter’s first ear infection gave her a 102 degree fever and the school secretary told me I needed to come into work anyway because there weren’t enough subs that day. I lasted 10 minutes before I went home and cried the whole way because I was leaving my students but I was also worried about my baby. I never felt like I was enough for my job or my family.

I wish I could say I was organized enough to have emergency sub plans ready to go at all times, but I never was. I avoided calling in sick even if I had no voice, migraines, or a looming cold but when my kids started to get sick occasionally I couldn’t avoid it. My husband and I would try to alternate, but inevitably he would have a meeting that couldn’t be missed so the default was for me to get up at 5am, leave my puking child with him before he started work, spend an hour and a half typing out plans and making copies for the substitute, and then return home to take care of my kiddo while also fielding texts and emails about details I might have missed in the plans. What color dots do the kids line up on after recess? What room number is music class in? Where do we take the lunch count? 

It’s amazing how many folks hear you are a teacher and respond immediately with something about how nice it must be to have the summers off. I sometimes wonder if families think that our vacation time is the same as the time the kids are not in school. I wonder if they know how many extra days we spend when school is over packing up our classrooms, often moving our things from one classroom to another, and looking at data that will equip us for the following school year. As soon as July ends, we start easing back into our classrooms. We open the window shades, clear off the cobwebs, and start bringing out our classroom libraries in bright, labeled bins. We’re writing names on popsicle sticks and coat hooks, reading through health information, and learning about our new groups of students. We have to start early, because we spend more than a week in full day trainings and usually Back to School Night lands somewhere in that window and everything has to look perfect. The days I did have off in the summer were spent working on the home projects that built up throughout the school year that I couldn’t accomplish because I had so little margin between work and family. I barely found rest before we started again, and I often had to remind myself going into each new school year that my life wasn’t absolutely over.

I unload all of this because I want to paint the very real picture of what we go through as teachers in order to love and fight for our students year in and year out. We pour our souls out for those kids. We go to the ends of the earth to make sure our students are cared for and engaged in learning. When I was sorting through 15 years worth of teaching materials in my garage when I left the profession, I had zero emotions about throwing out old files of lesson plans, giving away school supplies, and repurposing shelves and bins to sort my kids’ Lego collection. But I was wrecked the moment I started looking at the faces of students. 

I found a pile of old class photos, with memories stuffed throughout. There was the picture of the little girl from February of the year I taught kindergarten holding a whiteboard with her name written on it, as a memory of the first day she wrote it out all by herself. There was the drawing of a baseball field with the Cubs logo and Eddie Vedder song lyrics splashed across the top from the year the Cubs won the World Series and the students knew I was a fan. There was the five paragraph essay I received from a third grader on the last day of school about the history of Chicago because he wanted to give me a meaningful gift. I cried as I thought about these students. I cried because I couldn’t remember everything, I cried at how hard it all was, and I cried because of how much I loved them every year. I couldn’t continue sorting through my things that day because I had to sit with the tears for a while and affirm that maybe I had been a good teacher after all and that maybe my career had been something meaningful.

I left my teaching career because of how I was treated during the pandemic. It didn’t happen overnight. At first we learned to pivot and rely on each other and forge ahead in new, online ways. We found masks and figured out Zoom and all the other apps and got iPads in the hands of all the kids and hotspots into the households without internet. It was hard and we rose and then it was harder and we rose more but then something happened and instead of rising, I fell from the sky and crashed into the earth and broke into a million pieces.

Our superintendent made the decision to open schools for in person learning when the COVID cases were at their highest and he gave us three days’ notice to make it happen. 

“Our teachers need to be back at work,” everyone said.

“What the hell have we been doing all this time?” we wondered.

My body had been bristling with anxiety every time the mention of reopening schools without a vaccine on the horizon was mentioned, but this time the vaccine was only a month away, just not available yet. I was reading stories of teachers getting COVID in other states and teachers bringing it home to their families and I kept thinking, “I love these kids but I don’t think I’m ready to die for my job.” In the end, I knew what I had to do. I requested a remote position and because I had more seniority than other folks that made the same request, mine was granted and others were forced to go on unpaid leave.

At first, I was relieved. But suddenly, my class of first graders was pulled from me and I was thrust into a role teaching third and fourth grade students that I had no previous experience with. I had never taught fourth grade before. I pleaded my case with the school board, hoping to return to online first graders, but nothing changed except that my school no longer trusted me for having gone beyond them to the board. I received emails from colleagues that accused me of destabilizing my students’ lives by choosing not to go in person. None of the emails asked me why. Why did I make the choice that I did? What was I going through? I would teach during the day and cry in the afternoons and then barely parent through the evenings. I was steeped in grief from the loss of my students and the loss of my team and eventually I began to question whether this career was tenable for me after all. Once I started to question, the people closest to me immediately shot me down. 

“What career, that’s still teaching, WOULD you like to do?” my sister said.

“But you LOVE teaching. You’re so good at it. Why would you leave?” my husband said.

“I’m concerned that you would want to quit teaching. Have you really given the decision enough thought?” my dad said.

I cried even more from not feeling seen.

I did love it. But then I didn’t anymore. I couldn’t do it anymore. It hurt too much. They asked too much. I was exhausted. I didn’t feel like I had agency over my own body. And the moment I tried to fight for it, I was accused of not stepping up enough for the children. I was tired of never being enough. I gave up.

So I walked. I put in for a leave of absence during the last week of school and two things about that tore me to pieces. The first was that no one fought for me. No one called and asked me to stay. No one asked me why I was leaving or what was going on or if something would keep me around. The second is that word got back to me that a principal at my school said in the end that he wished I would’ve put in my leave a week earlier because they lost a couple of really great candidates they could’ve hired to replace me.

And just like that. I was gone and it felt like no one missed me. After 15 years.

I do have a new job and it is related to education. I’m excited to transition into equipping future educators as I work with the local community college to create a four year teaching certification program with a bilingual endorsement. I’ve returned to therapy to heal from the pain of what I’ve been through, grieve the losses I’ve had, and give myself room to celebrate the successes of my career. What I’ve learned most though, is how to find my identity apart from my career. And it’s taken time, but I’ve learned something else too.

I am enough.