For 8 weeks of the year, everyone is jealous of teachers. They scoff while we sleep until 10am on a Monday. They sneer at our stories of mid week beach trips. They gawk as we catch flights and not feelings. For 8 weeks of the year, they are reminded that they’re nothing at all like us.
I saw a meme recently that said, “teachers are not off for the summer; they’re in recovery.” I laughed, then counted the whys.
Item 1: This school year, I developed or worsened several physical and emotional maladies including but not limited to: severe neck pain, intense and sudden migraines (in which the first tell is throwing up and having diarrhea at the same damn time), chaotic ‘I wanna jump off the roof’ depression (thank Allah for Prozac, phew), wrist whatevers (I don’t know what but something tweaking and I can’t put my full weight on hand), and some other stuff I wish would go away but, wake up, teach teach teach, plan, grade, respond respond, remind, repeat!
Item 2: This school year, I spent 10 months with other people’s forthright & very whiny, unable-to-problem-solve children. Some of these children swung at me (playfully?), some crassly accosted me about their grades before the sun was fully up, and each one royally got on my nerves.
Item 3: This year, I spent 10 months dealing with administration and parents who have no idea what my job is or how to do it, but have lots of comments about my performance, and in the case of admin, make egregious and inefficient decisions about the structure of my job. Decisions which, as you can imagine, add more work to my load and lessen their load, ha!
Item 4: This year, I spent 10 months crying in my office after reporting or hearing reports of kids attempting to unalive themselves, being tossed around foster homes, fighting cancer, fighting each other, etc…
Item 5: This year, I went to several funerals of very young or very old or very sick loved ones and then immediately had to go back to work the next day and pretend it was normal because my paid days off are severely limited and mental health is a luxury.
So truth be told, after 10 months of “Miss Harris” replacing my body like a re-make of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I need more than 2 months to recover. I need to see doctors. I need to sleep past 5:47 a.m. I need to be irresponsible. I need to not be the example. And I need to talk to people my own age!
Even though sometimes it feels like I’m an unqualified, underpaid doctor at an all-genders prison, I love being a teacher. I am a masochist for learning (it hurts so good!). I am too curious not to be in the classroom, too intense to pick a slower paced job, too deep in inner child work to not see the kids as tiny mirrors of myself. Despite all the other things I could be doing at my hot, young, smart age, I choose teaching. Teaching is relating and relating is loving. It’s all my values mixed up together. It’s an exhortation to remain present, a call to model nurturance, an opportunity to intentionally relate to the very unrelatable, and a way to offer some of the most disenfranchised (yes, children) respect.
Being a child sucks. You’re broke. Your weird/dumb/controlling/sweet parents make all the rules. You can’t eat what you want. You can’t go where you want. You can’t wear what you want. you’re completely dependent. You have 20 counter-acting emotions in one day. You’ve been alive for like 10 minutes, but everyone acts like you should have a clue what’s going on. You can’t smoke (legally). You can’t drink (legally). And everybody makes a big deal if you have age-appropriate safe sex.
Fun fact: the day to day is easier when you realize the kids are suffering too. The playing field is leveled. We sit around and stare at each other’s suffering. And then I go, hey, um, okay, maybe you wanna write about it?
(side note: being an adult sucks, too. But at least I like my body and can afford Chipotle when I want.)
Fun fact: I teach at my high school. Which means, many of my co-workers were once my teachers.
Isn’t that weird?
Duh, but I like weird. Weird is intimate and full of possibilities. Weird is human. Weird is real.
So like, what’s it like being on the other side now?
I had no idea teachers were soldiers. #salutetheteachertroops
And like do the kids have the same teachers you had?
Some of them do and it’s good because I tell them that it’s okay you’re failing cuz in 2009 we ain’t have a clue what she was saying about them equations either, kiddo.
Teachers are as mixed a bag as kids. Some are really genuine and passionate, some are quiet pushovers with rowdy classrooms, some should have retired decades ago because it’s clear that they hate kids, and others should have just been cops. Actually, a lot of them should have just been cops. For some reason the profession attracts an overwhelming stain of “I feel powerless in my life so I’ll hyper fixate on controlling this micro environment and all the little bodies in it for the next 80 minutes muahaha.”
But all of us are simply people at their job.
People love to talk about teachers who they were traumatized by, and other ways educators fail children, but rarely do I hear the words “policy” or “politicians” or “the completely stupid structure of the American school system” coupled into these critiques.
In one day any one of us is paid less than $30 an hour to do 5 times the amount of work that most of you do in one week at your remote email ping-pong jobs. You might even have working AC and filtered water? Definite lunch breaks? And whoa, dare I even say, numerous at-need or just-for-kicks bathroom breaks? Recently, I read an article about GI and urinary tract related conditions that overwhelmingly plague teachers because of the countless hours we hold in our urine and shit. (Let me tell you, being a full-on adult who’s bled in my swivel chair multiple times is not cute… but genuinely there is no time to change my cup!)
Fun fact: I was a goodie two shoes in high school. Jesus was my best friend and I got double points as a good Christian who hated swear word music and their sexuality.
Teaching at my high school is like meeting that goodie two shoes babe at the front door every morning and telling them, hey dearie, s’ok, take them k-swiss jawns off. So i do. I work in proverbial bare feet. I try my best to unmask (while still wearing a KN95). I am myself– I tell jokes because they build bridges. I smile because it costs nothing. I remind them that I don’t have all the answers. It’s 7:45 a.m. on a Tuesday and I’m just a person at my job so no, I do not have a needle and thread or a sewing machine or whatever you think you need from my office so you can tailor your nice pre-ripped jeans that real-ripped in the car this morning. I tease and hope to be teased back. I am honest because most adults lie. I am aggro because sometimes I want to crash out. And I am sweet because I needed someone to be sweet to me. When I was a student there were only 3 black teachers at the school and I took class with 2 of them. Now we work together. Now I get to add to the number. Now I get to try and be the teacher I always wanted.
Fun fact: My favorite time of the year is the end.
After answering thousands of emails, managing the emotional/social environment for hundreds of strangers’ kids, creating and presenting new lessons, answering spontaneous questions, troubleshooting solutions to spontaneous problems, reading/editing/giving feedback and grading thousands of pages, being a therapist (the kids love to yap), being a nurse (do you also know how to respond to seizures?), I get to see how much the kids have grown. Some of them are finally writing in paragraphs. Some of them are finally conscientious of structure, pacing, patterns. Some of them are finally able to identify and use complex poetic forms. Everyone grows in some way or another– even if it has nothing to do with the lesson. But, really what I love are the treats. Student X and Student Y baked me a delicious vegan lemon cake, Student R brought me mouth-watering Mexican cookies, Student W gave me a gift card to Cold Stone, Student O spontaneously drew a pastel portrait of me before heading off to RISD, and an entire class of students put together a watercolor booklet on my desk filled with loving notes re: Miss Harris, Thank you for being a wonderful teacher.
Somehow after all the blood, sweat, and tears, it means something. For the past 3 years, I’ve taught a kid who doesn’t do anything. Less than nothing, actually. Sleeps all class and lies when the work is due. She’s a talker, too. Loves to participate even though she was asleep during the whole lesson. Loves to play fight with the only straight boy in class, loves to ask me questions that couldn’t be more off topic, loves to submit work equally as off topic. But a few weeks ago, after writing a reflection on what she’s learned this past year, this girl wrote, “I learned that if I don’t do the work, no one else will. It won’t get done. So that means I have to do something, anything. I have to start somewhere. And then little by little I’ll get to the other side.” Ding, ding, ding! The light bulb turns on. The bugle is sounded. We have a winner folks. And that’s why I love the kids– they are all equally capable of growth; they are each winners.
