Tag: teaching

What I Mean Is… We’re All Gonna Be Ok

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I’ve been saying “it’s gonna be ok” to people just about every day for the past two months or so. Because I’m a teacher, and I’m leaving my students.

I need to be more clear, and not just because I haven’t written word one on this page in, oh, a couple years? I worked at my current – no, my former – job for 8 years. I really, really liked it. No, I loved it. You don’t get upset over leaving a job the way I got upset if you don’t love it. I loved my job, I loved my students, I loved my coworkers.

But I’m leaving, because life does funny things to all of us, and sometimes opportunities arise that will never arise again, and because people on their deathbeds don’t talk about the things they did and wished they hadn’t, they talk about the things they didn’t do and wished they had. This is the kind of move that I would always wonder about if I never made it — so I’m making it. Even if it’s scary, even if it hurts.

The hardest part, by far, is leaving my students. I guess that might sound strange to any non-teachers out there, but I can’t even say I’m a normal teacher. I teach theatre. I don’t just have a student for one class somewhere in their 4-year career — I often have students for multiple years. Some kids I teach for all four years. Some I teach as freshmen, then not again until they’re seniors. Some, I never *actually* have in a class, but I direct them many times in our after-school performances.

Point is, I have *relationships* with these kids, and our group feels like family. And I’ve read so many letters in the last two months since I learned I was accepted for my new job — letters showing appreciation for what I’ve done, and who I was, and the things I’ve taught them, and all kinds of things. A thing I wasn’t quite ready to hear was, to how many of these students I became a father figure. (Yes, scary thought if you know me in any capacity, but that only goes to show how much these kids counted on me.)

So — my refrain, upon leaving them, has been: “it’s gonna be ok.”

Which it is. They’re getting an outstanding, well-respected educator to take over the program. I’ve worked hard to make them into confident leaders who can handle things even if their supervising adult doesn’t know anything about the theater (it happens). It’s gonna be ok.

And people leave, right? People come into our lives, and they impact us in big ways and small, and then a lot of them leave. Sometimes expectedly, sometimes not, but nothing lasts forever in this world. And that’s ok. And I tried to explain that, inasmuch as you can explain that to some very, very sad high school students.

What I didn’t quite realize — or what I didn’t want to realize — was that I was telling them that because I was trying to convince myself.

I’ve been in this job for 8 years. That’s well above the average term of employment in the building. I’m a *fixture*. I was ready to potentially play out the next 14 or so years of my career here, if it came to that. And I would have been happy to do so. I wasn’t *trying* to leave my position. And learning how much some of my students are hurting, how sad they are to see me go?

I wasn’t sure *I* was going to be ok upon leaving.

Because not only am I taking a new position, I’m moving. Out of state. To a place where I’ll know nobody (save my sister and her husband). I’m starting over. I’m leaving my second family.

I wasn’t sure I would be ok.

But suddenly, just a few days ago, I believed it. I believed it would be ok. I was shaving my head, and playing some 80s music, and maybe there were some chemicals at work, but I was thinking about leaving and thinking about what’s ahead and for the first time, I didn’t feel sad or worried or guilty. (The tracks were “Who’s Gonna Drive You Home”, followed by “Cruel Summer”, for the curious.)

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the school year is officially over, the seniors have graduated, and the goodbyes are, by and large, behind me. (That part was THE WORST.)

But I think it’s gonna be ok. It’s a weird thought, for an eternal pessimist like me. But I can’t help it. It’s gonna be ok.

If I’m lucky, for all of us.

They Don’t Teach Teachers This Stuff

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Teaching is such a strange job.

You can be going through a perfectly ordinary day, doing perfectly ordinary things, and then, suddenly, at 2:37 PM, something un-ordinary floats through your door and turns the entire day on its head. And you can’t push this thing until tomorrow, because it has to be dealt with right now. And you also have the rest of your day to get through and you have to pretend everything is still perfectly ordinary even though it’s not.

Okay, that sort of thing can happen in any job, I guess. But for teachers there are kids involved.

And, okay, okay, that sort of thing can happen to parents, too. But for teachers, it’s somebody else’s kids.

And you want to help them out, and you want to do the right things for them, but you can’t because … well, because you can’t, and the best thing you can do is hand them off to somebody else, somebody hopefully better equipped to help them than you. But you feel a certain kind of way about that because this kid came to *you* for help, they trusted *you* enough to come to you, and all you can do is send them on to somebody else, somebody they didn’t *want* to go to.

And you feel sick inside, tearing yourself up with questions like “did I do the right thing” and “was there more I could’ve done” and “have I made things worse”, but due to the nature of these things there will be no answers forthcoming right away or, maybe, ever.

And for obvious reasons, there’s very little about any of this that you can share with anybody, to say nothing of a webpage that’s available for anybody anywhere to read.

We are supposed to have all the answers, but I feel as useless as a square tire.

I Know Things

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I had a student ask me to fill out a psychiatrist’s evaluation for her. (Psychologist? I know they’re not the same but it’s not the point of the story, so we’re moving on.) Feedback on her performance in class, that kind of thing.

So I sent it in, and the next time she came in to class, she had this shocked look on her face. I had apparently marked that she has feelings of guilt and blames herself for things that are out of her control. This was shocking to her. “I never told you about that,” she said. “How did you know?”

Well, for one thing, isn’t that part of the human condition?

And for another, kiddo, you’ve been my student for three years now … of course I know some things about you. (For better and for worse!)

We have this disconnect with the people in our lives, and students — and all young people, really, but students especially — have this pressure to be this better version of themselves. It’s weird, I guess, when they learn that the mask can’t stay on all the time, no matter how hard they try.

It reminds me of when I was in school, the first time I saw one of my teachers out “in the wild” at the grocery store. It’s so jarring to see a person out of the context you build around them. I mean, of course they’re a real person who has to shop at stores … but you never think of them in that way. You don’t see the real person, you don’t consider them in that way.

But they’re real.

And I couldn’t possibly know this thing about her, but I did.

Makes you wonder what people know about *you* that you don’t go around telling them.

Impromptu Geology

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I had to step out of the classroom for a moment today, and when I came back in, there was a cluster of students gathered at the front of the room.

Any teacher knows that when students crowd in like that, there are likely shenanigans afoot, so I hopped over to break up whatever it was and discovered….

Rocks.

One of my students had brought in her rock collection, and the other kids were delicately, respectfully, excitedly passing them around. Quartzes, opals, tiger’s eye, amethyst, and a healthy smattering of geodes and fossils. They murmured and thrilled with excited questions and exclamations.

These are not elementary kids. These were high schoolers. Not jockeying to get the best picture for the ‘Gram, not taunting each other over their “dumb rocks.” Just literally passing rocks around with childlike wonder.

I typed “childlike wonder” before I remembered the phrase was redundant. We’re talking about high school children, after all.

Sometimes the simple things really are the most delightful.

We Has It

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COVID has come to my house.

Wife had symptoms at the beginning of the week, felt bad enough to get tested by the end of the week, and last night got her positive diagnosis. Meanwhile, I started feeling … ehh, not great about on Friday, and that’s developed into full-on yuckiness by today.

I got my nostrils roto-rootered out this morning, but that feels like a formality at this point. We have the bug.

And the big surprise about it is not that we have it, but rather how long it took for us to get it. Wife and I both work in schools, which — here in the South — have taken a bit more of a “we’ll take our chances” approach than schools in other parts of the country. Masks are optional. Social distancing is enforced “where possible”, etc.

But we — my wife and I — have tried a little harder than most, I think, to keep ourselves and others around us safe. And now we are forced (by our own sense of conscience more than anything else) to grapple with some tough questions. Who did we see in the past week? Where did we go? Did we really need to do those things? How many people might we have exposed, and how much responsibility do we bear?

This is a lot to think about, and for anxious sorts (like my wife and I — more so my wife than I but I, too), it snowballs pretty quick. So now we’re sitting at home with some unexpected days off, feeling gross because of this bug (though none of us, thankfully, are having any serious symptoms), but also feeling gross out of guilt and worry.

A plague on our house.

I’d love to bring something creative or insightful out of this, but I’m too cloudy-headed to think clearly about it.

Stay safe out there. Wear a mask.