Once I was teaching a class when there was some construction work going on in the building. The workers needed to be in a certain corner/cubby part of my room. More and more workers started coming and coming and going. A few admins appeared here and there.
The students I teaching at that time was one of those groups of kids we occasionally in which there are no bright lights, just dull kids, nothing to provide any spark to the class. We’ve all had such classes.
The kids weren’t the wrong kids – they just didn’t have any bright lights in them. So as the construction work increased, so did the feeling that I was losing control of my classroom.
By the middle of the class, I became aware that the class was dispersing, going in different directions mentally. Not a single student was paying attention. I don’t know if the construction had anything to do with that, but nobody was paying attention. In that moment I felt that grip of fear that only teachers can know in situations like that.
But I wasn’t just experiencing fear. I was angry. Very angry. I was at a point in my career, towards the end, in the last decade of what had been a total of four decades of a very intense professional life during which I had worked non-stop to bring my profession out of the textbook mire.
I was pissed. One kid was lying on the ground staring at his phone. A girl over by the window was just sitting there, as if I didn’t exist. Three kids walked out altogether. The remaining kids were milling about, again, as if learning French was the least of things on their minds that day.
Grabbing the textbook was not even on my list of bail-out moves, as I had moved them to storage years before, happy with my mostly rocky relationship with TPRS at the time, since this happened during those days, in about 2012 at East High School in Denver.
I started to despair. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t make this class pay a shred of attention to my instruction. It was hell. I was so afraid of being found out, that I had lost control of my class, but the admins coming and going seemed more concerned with the construction work.
I began to doubt my sanity in deciding to become a teacher. Yet, in previous moments like these, none this bad however, I had always come back in the fall because I had a family to support and no other skills to propel me in some other professional direction.
I just left the room, which is the cardinal sin in our profession. I drifted over to another wing of the building where younger kids were being educated. At least I stayed in the building. Things were less chaotic over there, but still there was that feeling that is often present in schools, one of mild chaos, one where things always feel slightly out of control and that something was wrong.
There were two young teachers in the hallway, both male, just out of college, who sensed my distress and walked over to me. They backed me up, and I almost fell into a deep three-foot hole in the floor that was not marked as a construction area, which further enraged me.
I came very close to falling into that hole, and as soon as I recovered my balance, I started abusing the two young teachers for not alerting me to the danger. I yelled at them that a student could be killed if they fell in.
The teachers tried to tell me that everything was all right. I forcefully told them it wasn’t. I left those two young teachers, thinking how their optimism was one that I once shared, but no longer. I felt old and immensely tired.
I tried to find my way back to my classroom, but I never got there. The building was just too big and there was too much construction going on, and I didn’t want to go back there anyway.
The wbole thing was very hellish. But it had been a dream.
When I woke up just now from that dream, really a nightmare, just now on this beautiful spring morning of May 3th, 2020, my first waking thought was about the front line COVID workers.
I could see in that moment of waking up that, in the same way that the health care workers during this crisis are experiencing intense but temporary suffering on a very deep level, that we in our profession – also front line workers – experience that kind of suffering for years, even decades, if we stay in the profession.
I do not wish to denigrate or lesses what the front line COVID heroes are experiencing right now in sharing this anecdote here on the PLC. The experience of those true heroes is unique. But I also wish to point out that the experience of teaching is often very similar to what they are experiencing emotionally. It is a deep and protracted kind of emotional suffering.
That aspect of teaching sucks and I hate it. I have had scores of dreams like that over my long career. Of course, God kept his eyes, his nazar, firmly on me, and saved me from many nightmarish situations, keeping them from being even worse, but it was still hellish. It still almost broke me every day.