I Am A Good Teacher

 

I am a good teacher.

What a confident way to start my *first blog, right? I use the term first loosely because I did have a blog 10 or so years ago on this same platform. Maybe someday I’ll crack open that vault and let you guys get a glimpse at 2010 Chelsea’s inner workings. There might even be a few of you that have stuck with me for that long and humored me in a reading or two. And there may even be a lesser amount of you that know that writing makes the list of Top Three Things I’m Passionate About. I’ll be honest and say that I’m not even sure at this moment what the other two things on that list are, but I can guarantee you that writing makes the cut. I have a whole tangent that I could go off on now about that, but I’ll save that for a later date, and get to the first of many scattered points I’ll make throughout this entry.

Writing is a release for me. It’s a coping mechanism and the way that I process things the easiest. Writing is invigorating, it is like my own affordable therapy, and it makes me a better person. Writing is all of those things while simultaneously being one of the most difficult things that I do. Writing is sometimes painful, exhausting and, the scariest word of all-VULNERABLE. Vulnerability. It is something I love in others, and absolutely DETEST in myself. Do you have anything like that? Maybe it’s something physical, like you hate your freckles but think they’re beautiful on other people. Or maybe it’s something like what my relationship with vulnerability is.

Other people being vulnerable= It’s raw and real and honest. I admire the strength it takes to put themselves out there. I value realness over so many other traits and that’s what vulnerability in other people looks like to me.

Myself being vulnerable= I am weak. I am not perfect. I am full of flaws. People will love me/respect me/value me less. People will judge me/talk about me/change their opinion of me for the worse. My real is ugly. And, for an added layer of complication-my job as an educator comes with a level of expectations that I am this superhuman who does nothing but pour happiness, light and love into my students…because that is what we want from our own children’s teachers, right?

So, anyway, to make my very first point, I’ll say this. Writing is the hardest best thing I do for myself. And blogging? Well, boy George, let’s take that most difficult thing and let everyone be a part of it. Why? Why am I choosing to put myself in this glass house and let you all watch from the driveway? I don’t have a clear answer to that. Part of me questions if it is part of the “day and age” that we live, where social media encourages us to tell people  EVE.RY.THING, from what we had for dinner, to what brand of air fryer I should buy. (But really…what brand do you recommend because apparently I need one of those magical things). Another part of me says that it can’t just be due to the social technology age that we are in, because people have been writing memoirs and autobiographies for years. And people have been reading those books for years. So, for now, I’ve settled on the answer of connectedness. I think that we, as humans, are always looking for some form of connectedness with others. We seek out friendships, relationships, colleagues and even strangers on the internet that we can feel connected to. That we can see a bit of ourselves in, or a bit of something that we strive to be. So maybe that’s it. Maybe I choose to put myself out there for the world to see because I hope that someone, somewhere can connect to what I am feeling when I write these things. And that maybe, in time, I’ll start to feel a little bit more okay with being a human that is FULL of flaws and ugly stuff. Just maybe.

 

Back to my title sentence.

I am a good teacher. I am saying that not as a declaration, but as a hopeful affirmation that if I say it enough, over and over and over this year, that I will start to believe it. Because I’ll tell you what, friends, I am not feeling it this year.

I have been teaching for a total of 13 years. I took my first teaching job when I was a wee baby at 20 years old. (And don’t bother questioning my math/age…I managed to squeeze in 4 years of non-profit administration in there too, landing me at the 36 years young I am today). I won’t give you all the details now because that deserves it’s own space, but I’ll tell you that had you asked me at any given time in the 19 ½ years prior to me getting that first teaching gig, what I wanted to do for a career, I can one hundred percent guarantee that my answer would not have been “teacher”.

And in my 13 years of teaching, this is by far the most difficult one I’ve had. Let me explain what most difficult means in this context, because teaching during my absolute best year, was not ever something I would’ve labeled as easy. In those years…I’ve had my classroom destroyed. I’ve have parents call me names that even I won’t say (well, I mean I’d say them because I curse like a sailor, but I won’t post them here.) I’ve worked alongside low-quality teachers and I’ve worked for the worst types of supervisors. I’ve been hit, kicked, bit, degraded and disrespected. I’ve made countless numbers of hotline calls. I’ve seen students and families struggle with homelessness, death, drug addiction, incarceration, and abuse and neglect in every sense of the word that would make you cry if you knew the details.

And yet still, this year has been my most difficult. You might be saying to yourself “no way, what could possibly have happened this year that is worse than all of those things?!” But, here’s the thing. It’s not one single event, it’s not nearly as simple as that.

Because unfortunately…all those aforementioned scenarios, those aren’t isolated events that happen once in a teacher’s career and never again. Those things happen DAILY in our schools. DAILY in MY school. Do all of them happen to me every single day? Well, goodness no. Your girl would be flipping burgers and getting hella fat off McDonald’s French fries or dropping your Walmart delivery order on your porch, if that were the case! (By the way…I just read an article about Wal Mart delivery drivers…where it mentioned that you can make $1000-$2000 a week doing that, and one employee reported making $100,000 last year…so I’m not counting that job out as a backup plan!) But those things are happening to teachers everywhere. And normally, we can take it in stride. What they don’t teach you in college (actually, I don’t recall it ever even being mentioned) and what you don’t know til you know, that a HUGE component of being an educator is finding ways to cope with all that stuff. Self-care is the on-trend way to say it, but us teachers have been figuring that out long before there was #selfcaresunday. And in an average year (ha! as if there is such a thing!), in one of those difficult but less difficult years, you figure out ways to take care of yourself and your mental health. You figure that out or you leave the profession. Truly. It is as simply complicated as that. Maybe you vent to your spouse or your friends. Maybe you cry. Maybe you drink alllllll the wine. Maybe you exercise. Maybe you sleep in on Saturdays. Maybe you start seeing a therapist because the anxiety of teaching JUST ONE MORE day becomes crippling. Maybe you close your laptop, and your planner, and you actually take a few hours of your weekend to yourself. And, in that typical year, you do those things, and then you bounce back and you teach those students because that’s JUST WHAT WE DO. And that’s what I’ve done for the 13 teaching years that came before this one.

But this year, for me, the extreme disruption that COVID has brought to classrooms and families, coupled with the lack of adequate opportunities for that precious hashtag selfcare has created this inexplicably difficult year.

It’s as if life came along this year and tripped me, and down I went. And as I was trying to pull myself back up and move on, the punches started coming. And before I ever got to my feet, I was knocked back down. Again and again and again.

Or, in a less Fight Club-y way, I remember having a leader who once told me that this career drains you the way that a cell phone battery drains throughout the day. Some days you come home and you’re still at 73% and you still have energy to make dinner and read to your child and connect with your spouse and, hell, even watch an episode of your favorite binge-worthy Netflix garb. Some days you come home and you’re on 20%, and you snap at your kids, and you bitch at your spouse for loading the dishwasher the wrong way, and you have cereal for dinner and fall asleep on the couch with your bra still on and 18 things left on your to-do list. So, what do we do? We charge our batteries (INSERT SELF CARE HERE). We try to get ourselves back to 100% by the next day so that we can do it all over again and hopefully drain less quickly. But what happens when you don’t ever get to charge your batteries? What happens when you start your day off at only 60%? And the next day you’re only at 28?

Over time, it becomes your most difficult year.

Teachers around the country are struggling. (*PEOPLE around the country are struggling, and I know that. But, for the sake of completing this thought-stream, and to stay true to my attempt at being raw and real, I don’t want to get caught up in comparing everyone’s struggles. I hope that is not interpreted that as me being dismissive of the realities and truths of others, but more as an acknowledgement that struggling isn’t a competition that we’re trying to win.)

Teachers are struggling. Not all the time and not every day. Maybe your child’s teacher has been full of life and energy and enthusiasm this year. Maybe you’ve seen the YouTube videos of teachers connecting with their students on Zoom and dropping off bags of supplies on students’ front porches for them. Those teachers exist. I work with them every day. Some days, I am that teacher. But some days I’m not.

This year my kindergarten class has been quarantined for a total of 24 days. For the first 8 weeks of school, students attended in-person 2 days a week. By the time first quarter ended (mid October), we had been in person together a total of 15 days. 15 days spread over the course of 8 weeks. 15 days that were structured as such that students had essentially flipped their weeks and instead of a 5 day school week and a 2 day weekend, students had a 2 day school week and a 5 day weekend. Do I need to remind you of the things that my students deal with on their weekends? Reread the paragraph about the population of families that I serve….

By the end of first quarter, we had been learning together for the any-other-year equivalent of the end of August. And we are in a pandemic. We are wearing masks. Masks that prevented my students from recognizing me the first time I changed my hair from up to down. Masks that prevent my students from learning what your mouth looks like when you form the sound /n/ versus /m/. Masks that prevent my students from seeing me smile at them. Not smize (Google that if you’re lucky enough to have not heard it until now), but SMILE. Students are sitting at desks, spaced away from their peers, strongly encouraged NOT to share, hug, hold hands or play…because there’s no time to play, we only have a couple of days to learn together! Students are experiencing all of this, during their very first year of school. And all the while, the expectations are still to have students “on grade level” and meeting the standards set in place by a group of people whom I can’t help but assume haven’t seen the inside of a classroom in 20+ years.

Take allllllllllllll of that, and fit it into my personal life that has, as of late, involved moving to a new home, having $35,000 worth of damages within the first 31 days of owning said home, living in a real-life construction zone, having a fully dependent and completely disabled daughter endure a 8 hour life-altering surgery, contracting COVID myself, and having a spouse who had his most recent hospital stay less than 12 hours prior to me writing this.

It’s been a difficult year.

 

I started this writing in an attempt to reassure myself and somewhere along the way I may have gotten off track. I’ve complained, I’ve vented, I’ve made at least 3 of you feel sorry for me, which is unnecessary I assure you, and I’ve lost sight of what I came here to say.

I am a good teacher. I will say it again and again and again until I believe it and until I AM it. I will continue to attempt to recharge my batteries, and pick myself up off the floor, and I will pour light and happiness and my best self into my students…when I can. And on the rest of the days, I will work to forgive myself for being less than the teacher that my students deserve.

I am a good teacher. And you, you’re a good you.