On Teaching
Even two-and-a-half years after leaving the profession, I still think it's strange that I was ever a teacher. Not just any teacher, but a teacher at a small alternative high school where the students were my polar opposites.
Fun Fact: In 4 years I never once received an apple from a student. In all fairness, I did get some nice gifts around the holidays. Thanks, guys!
I didn't 'fall into' teaching. In the midst of the Great Recession I went back to school and earned my M.A. It was something to do, and I did it well, an outlet for the energy I had up until then wasted by sending out hundreds of job applications into the void.
Even after graduating, there didn't seem to be any jobs. Oh, there were plenty of interviews. I the summer of 2010 I went on ten of them across three different counties. They were all "thanks, but no thanks," and I readied myself to take up the position of substitute teacher in the fall.
Yet my career as a substitute came to an end almost as early as it began. In January 2011 I landed a job teaching English at an alternative high school in the same county where I had grown up. To be honest, I had never heard of the place. No matter what, though, I wasn't going to turn down a full-time job.
And what a job it was. All the following happened to me in the first 18 months:
Was cursed out multiple times on paper and in person.
A student dropped the 'weed' (oregano) he was selling to his peers all over my classroom floor.
Was assaulted by a student who wasn't expelled let alone reprimanded.
Student lit a breath mint on fire during one of my English lessons.
If you were thinking that I was a fool for sticking around, you're probably right. On paper it sounds god awful, and some of it truly was. Yet there were some bright spots. The first was the other teachers. A small school, we all knew each other like family. We ate lunch together every day and spent just about every Friday afternoon down at the local watering hole. I still feel blessed that I got to work with the people I did.
The master at work.
And then there were the students, exiled residents from the Island of Misfit Toys, as my mentor put it. He was absolutely right. A lot of students, on their bad days, were anger, depression, and defiance personified. I'm not ashamed to admit that some of them gave me nightmares. But within that mix were the students with gifts (especially artistic) that I never imagined any teenager could possess. Others had endured such hardships in their lives, and persevered on their own. Simply put, I admired some of my students.
So I stuck around for them. Not all of them, but the ones I felt were worth it. That may sound crass or unfair, but think of it this way: if a teacher creates lessons with his most cherished students in mind, then every student benefits from a better educational experience.
The second half of my time teaching was a radical departure from the first half. Thankfully, the school hired a new principal who had the energy and ideas to affect positive change. We (the staff) didn't know what that change would bring, but we were ready to try anything to fix what we saw as a broken school.
The next two years were a time of adjustment. I put in some extremely long hours, but I did have a few special ways to cope with the added responsibility. On Friday afternoons, after the students had left, I would make myself a cup of coffee ( 5th or 6th cup of the day), and start up Netflix on the overhead projector before sitting down to grade tests. That might seem like a lame way to begin the weekend, but for me it was an oasis of calm after a hectic week.
Then came graduation 2014. It was the first and only time I saw off students who I had know since they had started at the school three years prior. (At the time my school didn't have a freshman class.) I was so damn proud of them. Even more memorable was two days prior, when on the last day of school a graduating senior told me that I was the best teacher he had ever had.
My signature move was bouncing Big Red off the heads of students who were slacking off/on their phones/generally annoying.
Yet even then I was thinking about leaving. Teaching had taken its toll. I felt overworked, underpaid etc. And yeah, i wasn't exactly fulfilling my primary life goal of moving back to California. But still, I decided to give it another year.
A lot happened at once in fall 2014, too much to mention. The result was that halfway through September I felt ready to quit. Telling my boss that I was leaving at the end of the semester wasn't the difficult part, though. It was telling my coworkers. I'll never forget how one of them immediately burst into tears just after the words left my mouth. A lot of my students, especially the younger ones, were upset, too.
My last few months as a teacher were actually pleasant. The prospect of taking a new direction in my life made me a happier person. I made my lessons as engaging and possible. A memorable moment from this time was when I turned my classroom into a silly string battlefield so that my World History students could experience the 'terror' of WWI trench warfare. After the battle, the class sifted through the silly string to find WWI quotes that I had scattered over the trenches (tables). After students reflected on the quotes and their battlefield experiences, we had some great discussions.
And then, on December 19th, 2014, it was over. I graded my last exams, packed away my personal items, and handed back the keys. But before leaving for the last time, I left a gift for my successor. You see, when I started teaching, the teacher I was replacing left me a box of chocolates as a gift. I left the same kind of chocolates, along with a card wishing her luck.
Over the last two years I've kept tabs on my old students. Most of them are doing just fine. Others, though, have stayed on a negative path. (Sometimes I wish looking up arrest records on Google wasn't a thing.) I hope all of them make it, whatever 'it' is to them. Because if I saw them all again, I would teach them that every person they'll ever meet is just trying to do the same.