I'm breathing again. That's how it feels early April at Spring Break and our one week off. Not having a break in February like other schools was tough as all we had was MLK day and President's Day off in February since Xmas in December. It's weird to have a job where you just think about breaks and summer, and it's grueling to go too long without a day off. I mean maybe that's most most jobs that people hate, but for teachers it's less about not liking our jobs and more about just how exhausting the job can be. And this is coming from someone with a lot of energy who doesn't often 'slog' through life although I know I am still new. And then you have people like Success Academy (just written up today) and KIPP who preach needing more time in the classroom...
I've been exploring options for next year and went to a teacher job fair a month ago. Leaving my newly minted resumes on the table brilliantly in my house, I hit the road and arrived ready to shmooze feeling a bit naked without my credentials. A few interviewers were shocked when I told them I could email them a resume and told me if I was looking for any info. I could check their websites. What's the point of having a job fair where you just drop resumes when you can do the same thing from the comfort of your home? Working in sales I learned that paper is often just a crutch. A true professional has all of the info. in their head - you are the product and you just have to convince people of whatever it is they are interested in. Besides, isn't anyone interested in actually learning about each other anymore? And why is the discussion of fit often missing from job conversations? I didn't realize that my first employer Equal Exchange was more of an anomoly in this sense but after Fenix this is one of the most important things to me I am thinking about at this point in my life. On a scale of 1-10 (10 being the highest fit) I would say I am currently at a 5.
But the bigger question is what am I doing with my life? Maya is starting as an attending next year with Grady Hospital, the big public hospital in Atlanta, like every other hospital - operating under the Emory umbrella. She is way more set in her career than I am. Coming up on the finishing dash of my first year of teaching, I have no idea if I could do this as a career. At the moment my intuition suggests no. Out of anything I've ever put so much effort into I've never seen so few results (I bet I could get more results learning Japanese). Yes there is the intrinsic reward of helping young people and doing something that matters in the world, but it just doesn't pay enough for the amount of work required of a truly good teacher. I am no martyr and while I am passionate, sometimes I feel like I don't actually have enough of it in me for teaching in particular. It still seems just like one option among many of important work out there. And yes, I know it will get better, the first year's the hardest, yada yada yada, everybody keeps telling me that. And that's why I'm trying this again at least for another year. But what type of career asks you to endure a bunch of shit for awhile until things get better? Most? Law and banking probably - except in those cases you maybe are more likely to work your way up a ladder. Besides becoming an administrator or principal, you don't start making a lot more money or getting a lot more opportunities necessarily as a veteran teacher...do you?
One good thing about teaching is that people respect the profession, way more than sales at least. Everybody always has something positive to say and conversation is easy with new people. Sometimes there are perks too; I mean beyond the free gas station coffee for teachers in February or discounts for Hawks and Braves games that I've gotten. I was running to a doctor's office about 10 minutes late last month and they cut me slack because they knew I was a teacher and they knew how hard it is too leave school in the middle of the day. That felt good.
On the other hand, earlier that day, one of my students finished an assignment early with 10 minutes left in class so I asked them to do another reading and with all of the teenage attitude she could give, she responded stubbornly, "I'm not gonna do anything more than what's required." With the amount of sleep I run on and the dozens of more serious problems I face every day, I just don't even always have the energy to try and fight that. Take one student, let's call him Frazer. He comes to class 30 minutes late with no excuse the other day, asks if he can go to the bathroom 2 minutes in, I say no (which is also by the way a weird position to be in; I have the power to tell another human being whether or not they can urinate?), he leaves anyways and I'm responsible for wherever he went and whatever he does now while I'm still trying to manage the 8 other things going on (it's the ridiculous amount of multi-tasking consistently that is exhausting). So I call his mother as I've done many times, since write ups very little consquences at my school and I can't figure out how to reach this one student, only to hear her say in disgust: "I'm so sick of this child" and hang up before hearing anything else. I guess that's better than being hung up on in a cold call during a sales conversation but inspiration can be hard to come by in any industry I guess.
It's much easier to say that you are someone with high expectations, you would never give up on a student, and you understand that everybody learns differently (as 100% of teachers'schools promote), and another to execute. One of my colleagues constantly reminds me: "We aren't here for the many, we are here for the few." That makes the challenge feel not quite as daunting, but it's a weird reality and much further from the pedagogical non-sense that dominates my certification program and permeates the political rhetoric around education that we hear about on the news constantly. It actually reminds me of time in Uganda when speaking to an international development professional who told me: "Impact a village? What? I challenge you to just impact one person this entire year. I mean truly change their life." Either that man was super jaded, or one of the very few real people around.
I'm still deciding.
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| Some scenes from my whiteboard recently...I do not have a teacher's handwriting |
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