This is what I keep telling myself. I am coming to the end of my third year of teaching. Naturally, I am reflecting on my teaching journey so far. I’m about to get real, so park any judgments or criticism at the door, please.
This journey has been hard. It has been good. It has been emotional. At times, it has completely broken me. Teaching is the most insane and wonderful decision I have ever made. But friends, I am tired. Half the time I feel as though I am failing. My to-do list grows and grows no matter how many hours I work after school and on weekends. I see all the things I have done wrong. I spend hours on a lesson only to realize I didn’t differentiate enough. I talk to countless other professionals about a challenging behavior with a student and together we come up with a plan only to have it completely backfire. I think the worst thing is knowing that so many people are watching everything I do as a new and “inexperienced” teacher and they have an opinion for EVERYTHING. And whether they realize it or not, I hear it all. I see their stares, feel their criticism rolling off their skin. Halfway through this school year, I actually thought I may leave this profession for a while. I was crying too often, stress completely ruled my life, I was on a diet that completely murdered me, I was underweight and weak, and I felt like a failure. I still remember when I went for a check up at the doctors office and she asked me how I was doing. I broke down, crying uncontrollably because it was the first time someone had asked me about me in months. Soon after that, I had 4 major behavioral and unsavory issues with students and their families all at the same time, which I was dealing with on top of the normal everyday “minutia”.
I took everything anyone said and laid it on me like a blanket. My identity had completely become about being an amazing teacher. My administrators liked me, I had said yes to too many obligations in an attempt to uphold an identity I felt (and often feel) I am unqualified for and for which I constantly feel I am missing the mark.
I love my students. I love that I get the privilege to work with such incredible humans. I adore the community my coworkers and I and our students have created. And you would be hard pressed to find another teacher more proud of how far her students have come over the course of this year than me.
But man, this year beat me up. We never got our all-star data system up and running. I still havent found a behavior system that fully works for one of my most challenging students. I haven’t figured out the magic formula for my high needs language arts class. And this is just grazing the surface.
Around January/February, I was starting to feel a little better. I was taking care of myself more. I was eating bread again and having weekends where I didn’t touch a lesson plan. I got a teacher candidate from OU. My husband and I started house hunting. I bought a laminator. Life was seeming a little better.
However, my classroom started to look like a natural disaster more and more frequently. My lessons were not their usual every-layer-of-adapted. My data collection never did improve.
Guess what? Everyone is still standing. I have seen immeasurable growth in some of my students despite my failures. I have become so close with the other MD teachers in our units. I have friends and a place in a building where at first I wondered if I was a nomad.
What has gotten me through this year is the support of the other teachers in our MD “department”. They have encouraged me, made me laugh when I wanted to cry, shared with me, listened to me share, and made me KNOW I was not alone. They also have helped me to remember that being “Mrs. Smith” is not all of me. I am a person in need of the same things my students need. I need friendship and rest and to know I have value.
Friends, this weekend I had all these grande plans. I was going to work on a new lesson involving a lot of colored printing and lamination. I was going to work on the 3 IEPs I have due next week. I was going to actually update my lesson plan website in the first time in over a month. Instead, I made a home cooked meal for the first time in weeks, cleaned the bathrooms in our apartment, went to church with my husband, and spent time with my in-laws and my cute niece and nephew.
As I look forward into this coming week, I can already foresee the imperfections. It is very likely I will take my students outside because they are so done with hearing me teach on plate tectonics, and every hands-on lesson leaves a tornado war-path I then have to spend 42 minutes cleaning up. I will most likely slam my desk drawer in frustration because someone has made me pissed as hell. However, these imperfections do not end with a crappy lesson or not maintaining my façade of "sunshine and rainbows". Much of brokenness is hidden. It lurks behind the fear of what people think, creeps behind the Doubt that makes my choices.
If you know a teacher (which I suspect you do), recognize their humanity. Recognize their need for rest. Recognize that they may just realize all the things you feel the need to complain about. Teachers carry a heavy weight. They carry the expectation to solve generational poverty and how it relates to families and education. They carry the pressure of their district, administration, parents and government to raise a new generation of young humans. They have IEPs to write, progress reports to get done, parents to call about end of the year banquets and field trips because no one sends back permission slips. They have meetings and professional development to attend and they do all these things on top of teaching our children and dealing with a classroom full of personalities and behaviors they are expected to reign in and solve.
For many of us, teaching is in our blood and we are good at it. But the same many of us will still leave this profession because it has become unsustainable. I do not want to be one of the many who are diagnosed with major depressive disorder or severe anxiety disorder because of this job.
For all you teachers out there, for all you who work in education, take some time for yourself. Spend time with your families, with your therapy cat or dog, with a good book and a glass of wine. I want you to know that I see you, I hear you, I walk with you in this teaching journey. Know that your identity does not reside in your job. Teaching is what you have chosen to do to contribute to the world, it does not define you. I have felt the dark cloud of teacher burnout. Know that you are loved. Inspite of your crappy lesson, inspite of the criticism of others, inspite of your own feelings, You. Are. Loved. That is your identity. I have spent too long listening to the wrong voices- there are some you just need to tune out. You are more than just a cog in the bureaucracy. You are worth it. You are weird. You are just as wonderful as the kids you teach. You are much more than you often think.
#teacherappreciation
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