Teaching is an All-Time Job (or,
Why Teaching is Beautiful and Amazing, but a Sacrifice)
I have a vivid memory of sitting in
one of my teacher college courses. The lights are dim, my professor is
lecturing on the “burn-out” factor.
“Look around you,” she says.
“Statistics show that in 3 years, 2 out of every 3 of you will no longer be
teaching.”
In my memory, I remember my 4.13
GPA, my competitive attitude, my stubbornness. Not me, I thought.
As I finished my third year of
teaching and signed my contract for the upcoming year, I celebrated. I made it
through the first three years and still had a fire growing inside of me that
kept my passion for teaching warm. The statistics were in my favor. I was the 1
in 3. And certainly, it seemed so. Through Facebook I saw several of my
graduating peers leave the profession, for what they deemed to be better and
brighter careers.
Not
me, my mantra
seemed to become. Not me.
And then my fourth year of teaching
hit me like a freight train. I am exhausted. I am angry. I am burnt out.
Now, don’t get me wrong here. Every
year of teaching has had its obstacles. My first year of teaching I came home
every night and drank. And then I cried. I cried because the job was hard. I
cried because my students were going through things that they should never have
to go through. I cried because some of my kids were mean to me. I cried because
sometimes my lessons tanked and I thought I was wasting my students’ time. I
cried because I worked so hard and so many students didn’t care. I cried
because I had no way of knowing if I was even doing a good job. It’s
frustrating to go from being a straight A student who can easily track their
progress to being a teacher whose only feedback comes from students. When my
students sleep, when they check out, when they don’t pay attention, all I can
think is that I have failed at my job. That if I was better at what I did, they
would pay attention to what I wanted them to do, and what I had to say.
The second and third year were
easier. Still hard, certainly. But I accepted certain things and tried to
better myself. The things I cried about continued to sting, but I no longer had
mental breakdowns every day while drinking. I played the game and gave up my
serving job so I could dedicate more time to teaching, and I persevered.
This year has felt much different.
My fourth year has given me a taste of teaching bureaucracy I don’t have the
patience for. Has reminded me that most friends I have who never obtained a
bachelor’s degree make a considerable amount more than I do. That I spend up to
10 hours a day working, sometimes 60 hour weeks, and am never rewarded for it
by my bosses or superiors.
Certain pieces of information have
worked their way into my mind, like realizing that in 2016, I make what is considered
a “lower class” income.
I’m college fucking educated. I
can’t even hit a middle class salary?
This profession is not sustainable.
It’s not financially viable. And it breaks my heart because I absolutely love
it. I love teaching. I love my students. But part of me has to believe that I
am cut out for more.
It isn’t fair that going into my
fifth year of my college-educated career that I still have to have a roommate
because I can’t afford my mortgage without one. It isn’t fair that I can’t even
take myself shopping for new teaching clothes because my bills deplete
everything I make in a month. And it isn’t fair that I seem to be the ONLY
person who is pissed off about this.
I am more than pissed off. I am
seeing red. When I think about the inequality in teaching, it makes me want to
scream until my voice is gone. And I feel inappropriate for having that in my
heart. Because everybody else seems to be so accepting of a lower class life.
Treating our teachers like lower
class citizens is repugnant, but more than that, it is a huge disservice to
America’s youth. I understand now, why good teachers become bad teachers. They
get paid the same, so why work a 60 hour week when you can work 40 and get the
same pay? I’m not rewarded for my innovation, and in fact I’m punished for it
if someone walks in and what I’m trying isn’t working. So why try?
On top of this, most of the time
teaching takes everything out of me. I have no energy left to work out, to try
new things, to motivate myself to do anything. This year I’ve started to ask what about me? I give everything I am
into my career. There has to be more to me than just that facet. And my career
is robbing me not only of financial security, but also of the ability to
explore who I am as a human being.
It seems to be a great teacher, I
have to sacrifice every other part of who I am. Because teaching is never done.
There are always more lessons to perfect, always more papers to grade, always
more ways to try to get students interested in what I have to offer them,
always more parents I could be contacting and more professional development I
could be attending. I am a workaholic and a perfectionist and because of this,
every other component falls to the wayside so I can try to be the best teacher
I can be.
And now I have gotten to the point
where I am terrified, that I will die one day, and still never even know who I
am. That I will leave this life knowing who I was as a teacher, but never who I
was as a human being.
My new mantra this year seems to
have become who am I? Who am I? Who am I?
And the truly beautiful and horrifying thing is that without teaching, I
really don’t think I have an answer.
I am treading in a sea of
uncertainty. And no one seems to see that I am slipping
slowly
under the surface.
